The smell can and will get through if it’s bad enough. Trust me, I collect gas masks.
Which is kinda silly. Then again, it would totally screw over the game’s shiggy something speed if it rendered everything happening everywhere. Though, I would absolutely love it if the reality bubble was at least expanded to be much larger somehow. Make the world feel more alive.[/quote]
Well one could just auto douse all fires that leave the reality bubble and pretend rain and or time did it.
Which is kinda silly. Then again, it would totally screw over the game’s shiggy something speed if it rendered everything happening everywhere. Though, I would absolutely love it if the reality bubble was at least expanded to be much larger somehow. Make the world feel more alive.[/quote]
Well one could just auto douse all fires that leave the reality bubble and pretend rain and or time did it.[/quote]
What about indoor fires?
Well i am at a loss … i migth come up with something super smart in the near future (or not)
The way we do that isn’t by expanding the reality bubble, but adding more things that can either do a small number of processes outside of it or can “catch up” when they re-enter the bubble by processing through the passed time/weather (like funnels do).
Sadly fire is about the worst case you can get for this type of stuff, since the options basically come down to.
- Automatically extinguish all fires when they leave the bubble (which leads to exploits like ducking into the basement to put out your base).
- “Fast-forward” the fire totally when you load it back in (which leads to weirdness if the fire would have spread beyond it’s original submap, as the whole land around you suddenly bursts into a raging fire simultaneously when you load the original map).
- Keep tiles with fire loaded while out of the bubble (which means a forest fire could sink or stop your game speed no matter how far you run).
Most likely the end result will be some sort of combination of the 3, but there isn’t an easy way to do it both realistically and computationally sound. 
Which is kinda silly. Then again, it would totally screw over the game’s shiggy something speed if it rendered everything happening everywhere. Though, I would absolutely love it if the reality bubble was at least expanded to be much larger somehow. Make the world feel more alive.[/quote]
Well one could just auto douse all fires that leave the reality bubble and pretend rain and or time did it.[/quote]
Would lead to players having to keep track of metagame things: namely, the reality radius. “Oops, you walked a tile too far, now your fire’s gone” makes no sense.
Autodouse is probably the best policy imho.
It does lead to basement shenanigans but honestly if somebody chooses to do an exploit like that it’s their own choice, I would rather have that optional and unrealistic exploit than the even less realistic and unavoidable mechanic of fires burning outside the reality bubble
To address KA’s point, if a player is travelling far enough away from their base that they leave the reality bubble, I feel like returning to find a fire doused actually does kinda makes sense (keeping in mind that it’s equally likely that it went out while they were travelling within the bubble)
[quote=“IcedPee, post:27, topic:7961”]Autodouse is probably the best policy imho.
It does lead to basement shenanigans but honestly if somebody chooses to do an exploit like that it’s their own choice, I would rather have that optional and unrealistic exploit than the even less realistic and unavoidable mechanic of fires burning outside the reality bubble
To address KA’s point, if a player is travelling far enough away from their base that they leave the reality bubble, I feel like returning to find a fire doused actually does kinda makes sense (keeping in mind that it’s equally likely that it went out while they were travelling within the bubble)[/quote]
My point was that a fire that otherwise would continue to burn should not be doused simply because I spent 6-30 seconds away from it. This goes both for the fire in your stove, and the fire you set to get rid of the fungal blossoms.
Definitely seems like the current method is cleanest. I do wish more fuel led to longer fires, but from my understanding of the fire code that’d be a pain.
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…
skewers.
houses.
Giant fungal flower stalks.
Their POUFing keeps the fire up until the heat death of the universe, regardless of weather conditions.
Pool Cues seem to burn a surprisingly long time and aren’t that rare.
hey a military black box transcript is good too its INFINITE just get black box and hack melchior
On the question of fires outside the reality bubble… isn’t it feasible to remember the last update time on map tiles? So it could be checked when you reenter an area and if, say, a day has passed, then all fires should be snuffed.
I usually burn my trash and items I don’t want.
I find turning two-by-fours into coal to be quite efficient, but it is a lot of work. Better to just wear a sleeping bag and live with the penalties. I cleared the lower levels of a lab once in a sleeping bag…
All you really need to track outside of the bbble is the fire’s spread. how long it burns can be dealt with when it enters the bubble. So you could keep track of fires that have somewhere to spread, figure out when they should spread, and then have that happen when the time comes. You would presumably reset this if they became real again. If you enter a place with a fire then all the spreading has already been accounted for and the bubble just has to determine how large the fires have gotten since they were started. It would still be a performance hit with big fires, but at least it would only process it on turns when the fire spreads… You could even have a chance of it informing the player that there was smoke in some direction or other if they were outdoors. Ideally it would inform them if they had vision of an outdoor tile, but that could get icky…