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[bombzero]

i was playing DF and found myself bothered that switching an herbalist to a farmer took complete retraining, not very major there but it gave me an idea.

what if some skills could sub-in for others for certain activities.
they would be valued at like 10% of what it would for real purpose.
this could be things like a fish-cleaner doing butchery.

its not a major change to overall gameplay or anything. but it might help out in those crisis situations.

any ideas? (skills that would do this/better title for post/revisions to my ideas above)

[Bohandas]

This is an extremely good idea. It combines the advantages of the skill consolidation proposal with the detail of the current system.

[Forumite]

Good idea, Farmer and Plant Gatherer could work as the same skill. Gathering plants would be free Farming-exp for my horde of unskilled drones.

[Footkerchief]

This has been discussed before at great length, usually under the name "skill synergy".

[bombzero]

This has been discussed before at great length, usually under the name "skill synergy".

hmm okay then, my bad. i glance through 10-12 pages before posting but you know how the forum is.

[nanomage]

There was a great thread on this: the one where the skill bitmap was proposed.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=85495.msg2304886#msg2304886

I believe if the skill system is to be revised someday, this and only this is the way to go.

[peskyninja]

I support this!

[Reelyanoob]

@nanomage: This idea in this current thread is OK, that "skill bitmap" idea though in the other link just cited, while it sounds cool, is actually a totally sucky way to put a real game together, at least as far as DF goes.

[Bohandas]

I've read, or rather tried to read the skill bitmap suggestion and I couldn't make any sense of it. It seemed almost insane.

[Starver]

I've read, or rather tried to read the skill bitmap suggestion and I couldn't make any sense of it. It seemed almost insane.

Which makes it perfect for DF!

(I've already made my own comments about skills, in prior threads, that goes a different way towards making someone proficient in a related task somewhat proficient in an otherwise novel one.  But it's more complex and may have been in those 10-12 pages worth anyway, so I won't repeat.)

[Reelyanoob]

A little off-topic, but one major problem with the 'skill bitmap' is that to find out if a bit is set, you have to :-

- load the 32-bit value
- load a 32 bit mask value
- apply the mask to the value eg "value & mask"
- check if the result is non-zero

At this point you know whether the bit is set or not. All that work to discover "Zero or one?"

It'd be faster to make the value a 32-bit skill by itself, in the first place. Then it would compute faster and give more detail.

Memory is no constraint with a few hundred dwarves. CPU cycles is.

Another issue is that 'adding together # of bits' as the level seriously reduces the total memory you can store in a byte/word etc.

With 32 bits you get 4 billion unique levels. If you consider each bit to be a separate equal value and add them together, you get 32 levels (which basically reduces your 32bit value to holding the same as 5bits of data). Also it's really slow to add bits together like that. You have to do 32 masking operations and additions in a row to calculate the amount. That's 64 maths calculations you didn't need to do before, just to get a number which could have been stored in less than 1 byte normally, and retrieved in a single CPU cycle.

[Bohandas]

The skill bitmap is deranged.