41 – RAMy Stony Sand

Oh my gosh! A real post! And the first one for this month. I am so excited! But I can hide it. Because I am over the Internet and you can't see me.

And I can't see you. Which can be a problem. While my blog is in no way popular, I am slowly getting a steady stream of comments. With YouTube messages, forum messages and direct e-mails, there is quite the communication going on. And Blogger is the weak link in this communication chain. It is very hard to communicate if I keep getting anonymous comments. So please, if it is not too much to ask, post while signed in. If you do not want to reveal you real sign in ID (for some strange reason; there is nothing I can do with it that would warrant such extreme security and privacy measures), make a fake one or something. It would certainly help not having several comments labeled as anonymous on the same post or on different posts.

So on with the show!

New RAM efficient storage system

As I said in one of the "Screens of the day" posts, I tried to increase map size to some ridiculous heights, like 1000x1000x60. The game is not designed to work with such huge maps because of the way task durations are balanced right now. But I found that with these dimensions, the game was eating up almost 1.2 GiB RAM. Completely unacceptable, considering both my future plans with it and that for 3D pathfinding it will eat up even more RAM. I set up to create a new system, which I have cleverly named IPS (Incremental Proxy System). Because it is clever. So am I. I only finished and tested the first iteration of IPS, which is not so efficient as the second one will be, but it is still an improvement:

That is roughly 610 MiB RAM. Well that is about half of the number that I found unacceptable. The second iteration is actually done, but unfortunately it is too buggy, so for now I'll only use this first version. The second should slice of at least another 200 RAM if everything goes according to plan. 

And here is the RAM consumption for a normal 300x300x40 map:

Negligible to say the least. It will use up even less RAM in the next version. After I finish this task, I will increase standard map size to 300x300x100 and add the fields required for 3D pathfinding and record the final RAM measurements.

Solution to stone problem

Another oldie here. I had a problem with stone digging. A problem of realism. When you set out to dig a cell made out of stone, you dig out a volume of 1.5 cubic meters. This stone needs to be usable afterwards for building stuff. But what to do with it. The obvious solution is to go with stockpiles. As walls are destroyed, the resulting boulders are hauled to stockpiles. This is not acceptable, since you would wind up with a system where digging takes a lot of time, most of it spent on hauling. The actual task of digging would be trivial when compared to the time and energy expediture of hauling. Not to mention that you would wind up moving the mountain from inside to outside or wherever your stockpile is.

I solved this problem at first in a rather poor way. Stone, after digging, would disappear, but you would still have access to it. So basically stone would move to a virtual storage, not findable anywhere in the world.

My new solution should be familiar to DF players, because it is basically the same thing. Not quite happy with it because it is a huge compromise, but I can't find a better system. When digging a wall, the dwarf hits the wall with his pick, until a boulder breaks off. The process continues until the cell is traversable, leaving the boulders on the floor. A little suspension of disbelief is required, because the 1.5 cubic meter volume is reduced to a smaller volume. So let's consider that you only deposit the usable boulders on the floor, with the unusable ones and other debris disappearing magically. Maybe in the future I'll have some refuse stockpiles filling up automatically as you continue to dig with ruble. And you will be able to pay trade caravans to relieve you of your surplus refuse. If I implement this this will happen automatically, without a dwarf having to walk from the freshly dug wall to the refuse stockpile. Here is the result of a huge dig operation on stone:

As you can see, digging though soil does not result in stone. The tiles are placeholder and too high for my tastes. I'll replace these with new ones that are also properly tinted. In this image, the floor and the resulting stone has different colors because it is not tinted, and it can be even more obvious when the stone has a darker color:

The resulting stone is fixed. Objects in the world are either fixed or not. Fixed objects are not automatically hauled, while the rest are automatically hauled if possible. Like logs resulting from cut trees: if there is stockpile, the logs will be moved there. Stone is fixed, so it will not be moved even if there is free place in a stone stockpile. You will need to manually move them. I will implement this for the next post, mimicking to log hauling system. Why not move them automatically? Because hauling is not fun. Dwarves do not suffer any movement penalty when walking on boulders. It has something to do with the fact that they spend their frikin' lives doing just that! But you can not place any other object on a floor that is covered by boulders. So you will only need to clear out small sections of the fortress, like living and industrial quarters. Stone will be very abundant anyway, so keeping stone hauling at minimum is best. When stone is needed for a task, a dwarf will pick first from the stones lying around on floors. If none is available, it will be taken from stockpiles. Or maybe the other way around? Doesn't really matter. No stone hauling! Geez!

A little more suspension of disbelief is needed when that small volume of resulting boulders is used to create a full volume artificial wall, but if you can't wrap you mind around that, just consider that the built walls are hollow.

Sand

You may have noticed a few tiles without boulders. These were sand walls. Sand is not randomly placed at world generation, even if it does not make any sense geologically. Here are a few cells with sand:

There is a small bug: sand floors are described as soil. I'll fix that by the time I introduce the new cell inspection panel you can see in the screenshots.