User:TheUbie

Interesting things I've found while playing Dwarf Fortress and/or playing WITH dwarf fortress...

Wasted space or Room for expansion?

While poking around with the memory values in the expedition setup screen, I found that either Toady has something sinister planned with the values of dwarf skills, or he's being very inefficient with his memory space.

From what I can tell, he has the total skill increases you can add to a dwarf as a 1 byte Int, which is good, as it's capped naturally in the program at 10. He has the total starting points for the fortress as a 2 byte integer, which is also good as it's normal starting value is at 1000, and you can move up a little if you dump all your starting supplies.

However...when I found the values for the skills themselves, I noticed they are 4 byte integers. From what most of us who have played with the values have figured out, each skills is ranked 0 (dabbling) to 20+ (Legendary...and it can continue to grow.) Now, a 1 byte int maxes at 255. Anyone who has played a fortress for an extended period of time will know that given skill increases...if you have a legendary miner or engraver working full time, you will get 7-10 skill increases a year. So, a full on hard working dwarf will max out a 1 byte value in around 10 years. Definitely not unheard of in this game. Move up to the 65k or so value of a 2 byte int, and we square that value...100 years.

At this point, I doubt any additional skill gain would matter at all, so..why should each dwarf skill (71 know, as well as 8 or so variables that appeared to be a skill, but did not show up in the starting skills...) take up 2x what is needed in the game? Throw on top of that the fact that most creatures also have skills, which I'm speculating have the same value scheme, and we've got a lot of wasted memory going, as well as increased calculation time on a macro scale.

Why is it done this way? Over sight? Perhaps some sort of future expansion in mind?

Who knows.

Best use of caged enemies

I'll post a movie of this when I get back off dial up and on high speed again...

Build yourself an arena, tame or trade for a few good vicious wild animals (Lions are my personal favorite), build both a cage with the animal and the enemy in the arena, link them to a lever, close the door/gate and pull...hilarity ensues. Be sure to make the area behind that gate also contain cage traps, so you can just open it up and let the bad guy wander back into captivity should he survive.

--TheUbie 15:14, 19 November 2007 (EST)