@pnathan oof

do many players use those gfx renderers that run alongside the game?

@alyx no idea. I don't. I don't see the point. ascii and an imagination are good enough.

@pnathan i wondered if increasing complexity would make readability harder, but perhaps not

i remember reading about the addition of multiple-story structures like a decade ago and thinking "jesus christ it was tricky enough while flat"

@alyx to be honest, I can't tell you. I think I live in my head and imagination so much that on-screen representation is not really a barrier.

@pnathan word. well, it's nice to see someone (whose posts i see, i'm sure it still has quite a playerbase) playing it in 2018. hope it's fun! or at least that you die in cool ways.

@alyx Thank you! we're going to have magic rolled out soon in a year or two. ::excited::

@pnathan haha. nothin' like this game.

@pnathan @alyx If I remember the actual game play is only bottlenecked by memory speed now of all things, even the smallest world can't fit into the largest L3 cache so the limit isn't processing power it's how fast the information the game needs can be pulled out of RAM

@Ashrand @pnathan
"first world problems"
"third world problems"
"dwarf simulation problems"

@Ashrand @alyx I should go rummage through the forums.

but a key issue was the threadedness of the code and the search algorithm.

@pnathan @alyx That isn't wrong, but it's also a technical way to say "why not just rebuilt the game" there are a lot of reasons, mostly related to poor planning, why the game itself runs the way it does, i wouldn't dare wonder how long it would take to fix all that and address the bugs it creates but it puts the myth arc down the road a few years. I'll take more actual development tbh.

@Ashrand @alyx the core issue though is without better algorithms the game becomes unplayable after `n` years in-game time.

I'd *love* to run a fort with ~100 dwarves for 250 in-game years. Really *work* that simulation. :)

@pnathan @Ashrand you say that as if horrible monsters wouldn't swarm out of your mountain's core and slaughter everyone by year 10

@alyx @Ashrand a well trained and equipped militia handles most of that. And for the really awful monsters, I usually throw a wall up and let them putter about while we sit at table above and toast our brave miners.

@pnathan @alyx Same, but at that point you are asking for Toady to abandon work on this thing and start a many-years quest for the other game, with all the design work that would require, which if it's ever finished still means a halt to any work on the interesting parts. He works really hard to avoid burnout but that would kill the best of us.

@Ashrand @alyx ::blink:: not really? he's already spending some time working on it because he recognizes that without improving core algorithms the game quickly runs into limitations in execution.

@pnathan @alyx Sure, he's always working on making stuff run better but moving away from a single-thread? Less practical without a time investment.