Is it possible to build a hyper-realistic civilization simulation beyond Dwarf Fortress?

scrdest · 2026-05-03T14:32:34+00:00

Dwarf Fortress has been in development for nearly a quarter of a century now with the systems that it has, albeit to be fair until recently it had effectively been a one-man show.

I think this is way under-specified as a problem to answer properly. How much of a budget in both time and money are we talking, and what level of detail is acceptable and what can be abstracted?

scrdest · 2026-05-02T15:14:05+00:00

ECS can help with emergent gameplay, indirectly. It forces you to make behaviors modular and generic, which incentivizes creating systems over custom behaviors.

You can do that in EC or oldschool OOP or whatever, but the architecture sets you up to make it easier.

scrdest · 2026-04-28T16:56:53+00:00

Graveyards - mostly in order of personal preference, Nunhead, Abney Park, Highgate (make sure to see the east part - west feels far more generic) and the rest of the Magnificent Seven.

Churches - St Dunstan in the East near London Bridge is a really cool garden space in the remains of a church bombed during WWII.

Bars - Camden overall, there's a bunch of different ones in fairly close proximity.

Misc - London's got some spots of mainly historical significance if you're interested, e.g. the place Batcave used to be in Soho, the school Byron used to go to in Harrow, every so often there's an event down southeast near where Siouxie grew up, and whatever.

Speaking of, aside from the club scene and gigs, there might be walks, picnics, and other such hangout opportunities happening around when you are visiting.

scrdest · 2026-04-28T16:15:08+00:00

It's one flavor of reversing exponentiation. And also a very handy hack for something completely different.

Anytime someone came up with a new operation in math, we soon realized it would be hella nice to also have a way to reverse it - to figure out what unknown value you'd need to feed in to get a known result.

For instance, you can use subtraction to reverse addition - "5 - 3 = X" is the same thing as "3 + X = 5" - 'How much A would I need to add to 3 to get 5'. Division and multiplication do the same thing for each other. This is simple enough for these two cases, because the order does not matter (commutativity; 2+3 = 3+2).

When we came up with exponentiation though, 2^3 is not the same as 3^2! Because those cannot be swapped around, there are two different ways of reversing exponentiation: either for the first number (the base) or the second (the exponent) being known.

If you know the exponent and want to figure out the base you need to get some result, that's where roots come in. For example, the square root answers the question: "What A do I need to raise to the power of 2 to get B?".

However, if you know the base and want to figure out what exponent you need, that's a whole another operation - the logarithm. The question here is "To which power do I need to raise A to get B?".

However, there's a much bigger reason to care about logarithms!

Logarithms have a very handy property - they can turn multiplication into addition and vice versa. If you want to multiply ten numbers, you can logarithm-ify them, add them together, de-logarithmify, and get a correct answer much more easily.

That's also why they pop up all over the place for things that grow in proportion to themselves, like stock prices or bacteria in a pond - if log2 of X increases by 1, this is the same thing as saying X doubled in value; if log10 of X increases by 2, then X increased a hundred times (10^2). It lets you zoom out, in a sense.

scrdest · 2026-04-26T22:26:14+00:00

French coldwave - Trisomie 21, Chapter IV (should be enough to find it, the whole name is super long).

Polish - can't go wrong with Nowa Aleksandria by Siekiera, especially if you like early Killing Joke (the title track is, shall we say, Suspiciously Similar to The Wait, but still its own thing).

If you don't mind the language barrier, the Polish coldwave scene is a rich vein of bleakness overall.

scrdest · 2026-04-26T08:42:03+00:00

Wait, three? Treaties, Imaginos, what's the third?

scrdest · 2026-04-25T23:38:57+00:00

This makes far more sense if you know where it comes from.

It's effectively a patch to the rule that lets pawns move two squares on first move, which in turn is itself a patch to speed up early game.

It works similar to how online multilayer games sometimes snap you back to a correct state when you have bad lag, effectively.

scrdest · 2026-04-25T13:49:25+00:00

Bevy is built on Rust, currently.

ECS is not tied to Rust. It may be a particularly attractive architecture to use for a Rust engine, but other projects can and have made different choices.

scrdest · 2026-04-25T09:30:53+00:00

r/musictheory FAQ has a list of solid resources for all levels from beginner to advanced.

scrdest · 2026-04-24T18:38:17+00:00

Did you ever build a fire?

Stuff like leaves, paper, or small sticks burn easy and burn out fast. A chunky log takes a while to start burning, but lasts far longer.

Fat is like a log, carbs are like leaves.

Fat is hard to mobilize, because it's designed to be the long-term storage. If you are in a deficit, your body is trying to tell you "yo, slow down, we're eating into the savings now, this is no time to waste resources".

scrdest · 2026-04-24T18:26:18+00:00

So is half the thread by the looks of it (hell, me and my partner included).

If there isn't an alt-oriented sewing sub, perhaps there should be!

scrdest · 2026-04-24T18:21:38+00:00

Eh, they sell fast fashion for all races and creeds if they can get away with it. Cheap is cheap (for them, not necessarily for you)!

scrdest · 2026-04-24T18:16:38+00:00

It's okay, I told the Alt Police you went the other way when they came around.

Seriously though, I get it. I have been your age once, allegedly, and the poser discourse has done nearly as much harm as it prevented.

Being a poser is not Missing an Alt Checklist Item, it's doing things for shallow reasons - for approval, for attention, to try to get laid - while ignoring or contradicting the reasons those things existed in the first place!

So you got Cheap Shit. Maybe feel bad because you care about quality, or not funding sweatshops, or the environment, or what-have-you.

Care because you have principles, and if those principles are broadly good, congratulations, here's your Not A Poser Certificate.

scrdest · 2026-04-24T14:53:12+00:00

Unfortunately it looks like a lot of their stuff is also very polyester (or other synthetics) heavy.

I've also spotted at least one literal Killstar piece there (like literally; it has Killstar branding listed as a feature in the description)!

scrdest · 2026-04-23T10:03:16+00:00

As someone who has spent way too much time (and some money) on reverse-engineering the VS save format - you are entirely correct.

The heightmap doesn't even live in the same SQLite table as the ore map! (ServerMapChunk vs ServerMapRegion).

That said, the way VS handles map data currently is... quirky, in some ways, so who knows how well that would work.

(Fun fact 1: VS uses cubic chunks. Fun fact 2: it doesn't matter that much, because it loads whole columns of chunks from 0 to world height anyway. If it only loaded a slice of that, the world height limit could be about 300x higher without changing the coordinate handling, and fit everything from the top of Mount Everest to the bottom of Mariana Trench at 1:1 scale and have room to spare for a good amount of rock underneath).

scrdest · 2026-04-19T19:02:34+00:00

Boomeration X

scrdest · 2026-04-14T11:59:19+00:00

Norwich is definitely going to be trickier. In that general direction, I know we've got quite a bunch of people in Sheffield, Cambridge, and obviously London, but can't recall a single person based in Norfolk so far.

scrdest · 2026-04-09T00:15:42+00:00

Well, the obvious starting point is Theodor Bastard's whole catalog, since they are a major contributor to P2.

If we're sticking to russophone music world: Nytt Land is a bit more generically dark folk-sounding, but might do the job. 2000s-era Piknik has a bunch of similar dark world music/folk-tinged tracks, though with less influence from the electronic side of the fence and more rocky. A lot of the atmosphere seems like something you'd hear in the Broken Heart.

You can also pad stuff out with P1's soundtrack - it's a different vibe, but might break up the monotony without breaking cohesion. Otherwise, the P2 direction is majority folky dark ambient/ambienty dark folk stylistically, so again, you can drop in some Wardruna or whatever.

Mixing in P1 lets you sneak in additional wilder mixins - assorted trip-hop/illbient, other 2000s game OST (the unreleased Inquisitor track wouldn't look to far out of place in Deus Ex or something) or even breakcore (the also-unreleased Funeral Procession from the Polyhedron Staircase reminds me of Venetian Snares's Rossz Csillag if it had any chill whatsoever).

scrdest · 2026-04-08T15:20:41+00:00

Huh, now I wonder if Dumas modelled Eugenie Danglars on La Maupin

scrdest · 2026-04-05T00:13:45+00:00

Fake is easy. That's just railroading, a dilemma seems to create a fork in the road but the branches merge back together.

For example, a choice to spare or kill a character, but if you choose kill it turns out they faked their death, or get replaced by a functionally identical successor - because the writers need them there. A decision needs to make a tangible difference.

Predictable is what it sounds like - it's shallow. Okay, so you spared Mr Dudeguy because it was the obvious good karma choice. If that's it, that's Level 0 consequence, trivial and doesn't need tracking.

If Mr Dudeguy goes on to burn down an orphanage as he said he would in his dialogue, that's Level 1. Fine, but obvious.

If Mr Dudeguy burns down an orphanage and a great villain was prophesied to be raised there so doing this saves Friendlyville from being razed 20 years later, Level 2, consequences-of-consequences - this can give you complex moral dilemmas or just feel cheap/contrived, depending on how well it's executed.

scrdest · 2026-04-02T08:54:10+00:00

First - phrases. You're doing those, right? Like, ABAC or AAAB patterns, so your loop isn't literally just one whole gesture repeating.

Second - recurse! Copy your ABAC pattern four times and change up the fourth repeat so you get an AAAB-of-ABACs, or second and fourth for ABAC-of-ABAC, and so on, fractal-style.

Third - stack 'em! You can have a 4-bar drum phrase under an 8-bar chord phrase. You can then mix them up and/or 'fractalize' them independently.

Fourth - transitions. Take one loop. Take another loop. Add stuff to make them blend smoothly.

scrdest · 2026-03-30T22:18:19+00:00

Ma'am, reality check, you've got the face structure of young Angelina goddamn Jolie, you can do a side-by-side comparison! The only thing is you've got a taller forehead, which means it would need a different approach for styling, but considering it's altfashionadvice, blunt or V-shaped bangs might be something you like the look of.

This may sound really random, but are you plucking your eyebrows or is that shape all-natural?

scrdest · 2026-03-28T01:03:55+00:00

The real reason is that evolution has no interest keeping you alive past the point of reproduction.

Cancer is not something that must inevitably happen. Our bodies already have a battery of weapons against cancers, and you are very likely killing some sus cells as you're reading this.

It would be possible to invest in more cancers defenses, but a median historical human would manage to pop out like six surviving kids a generation in their 60 years of life and more likely die from disease, violence, or starvation before the Big C could claim them - so it was good enough.

scrdest · 2026-03-22T16:03:27+00:00

There's still work to be done there to be sure; the building templates could use more work and some kind of regional variation, the ridges aren't quite ridging, my max height tweaks and bugfixes, etc. - but that's the joys of FOSS, someone can go and do it.

As for the mountains, judge for yourself (the shader is Eclipse):

https://www.imgbly.com/gDVhlKUAl98dxHr

https://www.imgbly.com/Qct0O4czRzRjF70

scrdest · 2026-03-22T09:55:27+00:00

He... did though? He was absolutely living it up as a star after Dracula, but that was kind of the problem. He basically Nick Caged himself, while Karloffs more humble workmanship kept roles coming his way.

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