The Netbook Thread

[HGFB]

I'm installing Windows on mine to turn it into a portable Dwarf Fortress box

[Firefox]

[HGFB]

When the fortress calls you just gotta be ready.

[Dio]

It's about as fast as Intel said, roughly 900 MHz Pentium M level.

It's an in-order core, isn't it? Be interesting to see how it fares on asm vs. C code for key inner loops. All that cruft that's irrelevant on the superscalar x86's will suddenly be important again. Does it have VTune support?

[HGFB]

When the fortress calls you just gotta be ready.

Except in this case where the Eee is far too slow to run DF properly. Shame that.

[WiteWulf]

Er...what's the score here? I'd never heard of Dwarf Fortress until this thread so had a quick look and it just looks like Nethack. Why does this need Windows and, for that matter, why the hell is a 900MHz Pentium M not up to the job? I used to run Nethack quite happily on a 486, what's so special about Dwarf Fortress?

[HGFB]

There's a hell of a lot going on under the hood.

[WiteWulf]

There's a hell of a lot going on under the hood.

Care to elaborate? I'm fascinated as to what an ASCII dungeon crawler could possibly need all that computing horsepower for (unless, of course, it's written in Java ).

[HGFB]

It's an insanely complicated management sim in the style of Dungeon Keeper. It looks like a roguelike but the resemblance stops there. You can have (at the default settings) up to a 100 dwarves pathfinding around an area you've constructed. That doesn't include children, animals and assorted creatures. The game has a dynamic temperature system, fluid dynamics and weather.

Dwarf Fortress is a single-player fantasy game. You can control a dwarven outpost or an adventurer in a randomly generated, persistent world.

Although Dwarf Fortress is still in a work in progress, many features have already been implemented.

* The world is randomly generated with distinct civilizations spanning over 1000 years of history, dozens of towns, hundreds of caves and regions with various wildlife.
* The world persists as long as you like, over many games, recording historical events and tracking changes.
* Command your dwarves as they search for wealth in the mountain.
o Craft treasures and furniture from many materials and improve these objects with precious metals, jewels and more.
o Defend yourself against attacks from hostile civilizations, the wilderness and the depths.
o Support the nobility as they make demands of your populace.
o Keep your dwarves happy and read their thoughts as they work and relax.
o Z coordinate allows you to dig out fortresses with multiple levels. Build towers or conquer the depths.
o Build floodgates to divert water for farming or to drown your adversaries.
o Much much more...
* Play an adventurer and explore, quest for glory or seek vengeance.
o Meet adversaries from previous games.
o Recruit people in towns to come with you on your journey.
o Explore without cumbersome plot restrictions.
o Seamlessly wander the world -- 197376 x 197376 squares total -- or travel more rapidly on the region map.
o Accept quests from the town and civilization leaders.
o Retire and meet your old characters. Bring them along on an adventure with a new character or reactivate them and play directly.
o Z coordinate allows you to move seamlessly between dungeon levels and scale structures fighting adversaries above and below.
* The combat model uses skills, body parts, wrestling, charging and dodging between squares, bleeding, pain, nausea, and much more.
* A dynamic weather model tracks wind, humidity and air masses to create fronts, clouds, rain storms and blizzards.
* Over two hundred rock and mineral types are incorporated into the world, placed in their proper geological environments.
* Add new creatures, weapons, plants, metals and other objects via modifiable text files.
* Extended ASCII character set rendered in 16 colors (including black) as well as 8 background colors (including black).

Have a wander around the Wiki. http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Main_Page

[Dio]

Could be a memory issue - it's absolutely bloody huge, the VM size is well over 500M with a 300M working set. It just plain isn't stable on my laptop, although it works without a hitch on the main machine at home.

[HGFB]

With a map running the cpu is running flat out at 100% constantly.

[Dio]

It's unnecessarily CPU hungry, I suspect it hasn't been set up to yield properly. My laptop's a single core and it makes the entire thing chug to hell unless I drop the priority.

[WiteWulf]

Ah...makes a lot more sense when you explain it like that. Very complicated stats monging engine coupled with (apparently) bad coding does not equal a fluid experience

[HGFB]

Going from the inconsistent UI I do have a suspicion that there's a lot of room for opimization in there It's not that it's unplayable. Just that everything runs about a 3rd of the speed as on my desktop. I should switch on the FPS counter and check the difference.

[Dio]

Don't get me wrong, I think he's doing an awful, awful lot under the hood there.