KA101’s right on the money with how hack-y the douse policy would be. [size=8pt](Keep in mind how fast one’s character traverses a tile! Obviously this varies by character, but: If I take six seconds to cross one, it would take me a minute to cross ten. Five minutes to cross fifty. Given my experience playing thus far, I assume at that point I am likely outside the fire’s reality bubble. The fire is certainly lasting longer than that if I stoked it with anything besides newspaper.)[/size]
If the reality bubble were extended enough for a fire to plausibly burn out during the time it takes for you to trek that far, that still only really ‘appeases’ contained-fire setups like fireplaces. That and the bubble size required for such appeasement might still be too large for timely game processing. “it rained conveniently” doesn’t work well when I’m outdoors and can damn well see it’s sunny. Still weird.
As for me, I find myself thinking about the possible ideas for re-working static spawns, with ideas on how to track creatures even while they wander off-map. I wonder if something might be done to that effect for fires? (Unless that avenue of thought is also being hamstringed by processing challenges - I have little idea of the processing required by the game in any aspect, so my apologies if my thoughts are based on a flawed impression of requirements!)
A simple but not a very smart approach would just be to create a countdown timer set to the number of ticks it takes the longest-burning item to extinguish. While this would be a bad idea to implement for uncontained multi-tile fires, it might be an ok workaround for fires inside of fireplaces or other flame-containing tiles. It wouldn’t track the size of the fire, fuel present, nor how long it’d already been burning, which makes it light at least. You’d still get the occasional situation where you come back into the bubble at a point longer than an offscreen item should burn yet shorter than the countdown, but it would at least cut back on the really obvious “I left this brazier a day and a half ago” situations.
I suppose you’d need to create some sort of method of tracking which fires are ‘contained’. I am not sure if a tag would be applicable that could trigger the countdown creation when fire is lit in it. Not sure how multiple fireplaces would work out with this method. In most instances the fire would go out with the person on-screen before the countdown reaches zero. Maybe if the fire in that tagged tile is extinguished by other means, set the countdown to 0 and resolve that. If a new item is added to the fire while it is still burning, re-set the countdown to the pre-defined burnout value. The countdown would only extinguish the fire if the fire that initiated it was inside the reality bubble and it was also zero. The countdown would have to continue regardless of z-levels. This might actually address basement fireplaces.
In hindsight, this should maybe be in a new thread about fire-reworking…
