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[TolyK]

The cities more or less show up in tiles now, and I've been fiddling with storm sewers under the paved roads for the last few days. They should be entertaining adventure environments, especially if the people forget to grate off the outflow and critters get in from the river.

ooooh yeah! awesome!
I wonder if we will be able to remove the grates ourselves - would be awesome!

[NW_Kohaku]

I'd still rather have the possibility of bridges like that than not have the possibility of bridges like that. Especially if there's no good, reasonable reason to put it there. Just because it's a bug or a flaw in some procedural generator does not mean it needs to be removed or fixed, especially if it adds to the flavor of the game.

Which is why Toady One removed the value of mermaid bones from the vanilla game.

Dwarves were never supposed to harvest and butcher mermaids.  The work-around that someone found and managed to use to profit off of industrial-scale farming and murder of sentient beings, because, remember, dwarves are supposed to consider many of the things that players revel in doing to be unthinkable crimes.

I'm sure he's also a little miffed by the treatment of cats that many players perform.  He probably split off the "Adopts Owner" tag to just get people to stop genociding cats.

If something is stupid and pointless, and demonstrates that this is a mindless simulation when he has clearly worked very hard to generate verisimilitude in his world, it is something he should know about.

Right now, all you're arguing is that bugs that reveal how unrealistic the game that Toady has worked so hard to try to make realistic is actually a good thing, and shouldn't be fixed.

No matter how lofty its goals are, the game is never going to be able to fully model all of the things that make humans inefficient and chaotic, especially in something as big and as convoluted as city planning.

So it's not only all-right but desirable for the city-planning algorithm to occasionally make odd decisions.  Ideally, yes, it would model everything leading up to those odd decisions, but that's not going to be feasible in all cases.

The problem with this is that you are completely discounting how massive a project bridge-building is.

Miuramir just went to great lengths to demonstrate how much trouble it is for a medieval society to build a bridge, and how costly they are.

It is not a matter of placing 1 stone for every three tiles of bridge, that's a game mechanic, and it is blatantly unrealistic.  Real bridges were serious endeavors that cost significant sums of cash, and were not taken lightly.

A random road that has an inefficient path?  Fine, it's stupid and gamey, but you could at least see someone clearing a dirt path in an odd direction. 

A massive engineering project?  No.  Those were things of great import, and were done only when it would be proven to be very economically lucrative to build.

[Mephansteras]

A random road that has an inefficient path?  Fine, it's stupid and gamey, but you could at least see someone clearing a dirt path in an odd direction. 

A massive engineering project?  No.  Those were things of great import, and were done only when it would be proven to be very economically lucrative to build.

Well, as someone else mentioned this somewhat depends on the scope of the bridge. Over a river: obviously a major effort. A small footbridge over a stream? that could easily be made by a few people who'd make use of it and wouldn't need to be a massive endeavor. So once we start to see a distinction between major bridges and small personal bridges I think having small bridges randomly show up is fine.

And, of course, once we have manor houses and other areas of the rich you can have all sorts of frivolous nonsense. It might still be a major project, but that's never stopped the rich from spending their money on stupid stuff in our history. No reason it should stop them in the game.

[LoSboccacc]

and yet, romans built a bridge over Rhine in ten days just to make a point over barbarian armies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar%27s_Rhine_bridges

yes, romans where quite more engineering oriented that other people living in that ages (but less architectural oriented than greeks, for example) but we're talking on a world with living dwarven architects so meh.

[Footkerchief]

The problem with this is that you are completely discounting how massive a project bridge-building is.

Miuramir just went to great lengths to demonstrate how much trouble it is for a medieval society to build a bridge, and how costly they are.

It is not a matter of placing 1 stone for every three tiles of bridge, that's a game mechanic, and it is blatantly unrealistic.  Real bridges were serious endeavors that cost significant sums of cash, and were not taken lightly.

A random road that has an inefficient path?  Fine, it's stupid and gamey, but you could at least see someone clearing a dirt path in an odd direction. 

A massive engineering project?  No.  Those were things of great import, and were done only when it would be proven to be very economically lucrative to build.

Man, have I got some bad news for you about castles.

[Neonivek]

Also not all bridges were magnificant awe inspiring bridges.

Nor is there any indication that the ones in Dwarf Fortress are.

I mean... I've seen bridges, Long bridges, that were hardly the "awe inspiring feat of engineering" your talking about. I've seen a town where EVERY house had its own bridge.

[Beardless]

Right now, all you're arguing is that bugs that reveal how unrealistic the game that Toady has worked so hard to try to make realistic is actually a good thing, and shouldn't be fixed.

Yes. It's a flaw. I think you've made your point.

Be that as it may, right now the reason for bridges seems to be "a road hit a river." Once the game actually starts building things for a reason, we can worry about things being there for no reason. If I remember correctly, the city generation Toady is working on is just a prototype--just a step above "placeholder"--and it's not even released yet!

Also, it seems a little odd to get so upset over an arguably misplaced bridge when dwarves still can't tell they're on fire. Just saying.

[Cruxador]

Also not all bridges were magnificant awe inspiring bridges.

Aye, this is a good point.
"Oh, honey, I got that bridge you wanted done."
"You built an entire bridge in one afternoon?"
"Sure, there was a tree standing right there, took me like an hour and a half to saw through it, and an other two hours to take the branches off."

[Untelligent]

I don't see why I shouldn't set up a massive industrial mermaid harvesting thing just because Toady thinks dwarves wouldn't do that.

[Jeoshua]

And I don't see what mermaids have to do with bridges.

[darkflagrance]

I don't see why I shouldn't set up a massive industrial mermaid harvesting thing just because Toady thinks dwarves wouldn't do that.

Mermaid harvesting on grand scales has very well-established roots in fantasy for such benefits as immortality from the consumption of their flesh. A little thing like less valuable bones won't stop me from following in the tradition of my ancestors...

[Askot Bokbondeler]

I don't see why I shouldn't set up a massive industrial mermaid harvesting thing just because Toady thinks dwarves wouldn't do that.

you are free to mod that. you can also mod dwarves to be cannibalistic, but toady thinks dwarves wouldn't do that, so he turned it off on their ethics

[Miuramir]

The problem with this is that you are completely discounting how massive a project bridge-building is.

Miuramir just went to great lengths to demonstrate how much trouble it is for a medieval society to build a bridge, and how costly they are.

It is not a matter of placing 1 stone for every three tiles of bridge, that's a game mechanic, and it is blatantly unrealistic.  Real bridges were serious endeavors that cost significant sums of cash, and were not taken lightly.

A random road that has an inefficient path?  Fine, it's stupid and gamey, but you could at least see someone clearing a dirt path in an odd direction. 

A massive engineering project?  No.  Those were things of great import, and were done only when it would be proven to be very economically lucrative to build.

I would prefer a situation where material and quality matters a lot more than it does.  A human community should be able to build a no-quality Birch Footbridge with Rope Reed Fittings over a small, low creek fairly easily in terms of manpower and materials (assuming you're in someplace with wood); it would be vulnerable (at least in worldgen) to floods, fires, sieges, and gradual rot / wear; and probably need to be rebuilt every so often.  An +Oak Cartbridge+ with +Iron Fittings+ would probably require bringing in at least one skilled archtect, possibly importing the fittings, and a fair amount of much higher-skilled labor; it should have a much lower chance to fail in worldgen rolls, and the return of the "accessible via wagon" mechanic actually has a considerable degree of utility in looking at the differences between the scales of transport links; this would give locations a game-mechanical *reason* to want to invest in the larger bridge despite the up-front costs.  The Untertorbrücke may well be a ≡Sandstone Double-cart Bridge≡ with ≡Granite Fittings≡ (and in several time periods *Granite Fortifications*), and for a random human community should require hiring a master architect (at considerable expense) and years of skilled labor; but they get something fireproof and floodproof that lasts for hundreds of years with comparatively little maintenance (most of the changes over the last 500 years have been adding or removing various combinations of add-on gates and fortifications). 

Note that I'm well aware that DF is ultimately intended to be a *fantasy* world simulator; one logical way to develop this is for Dwarves to have significantly improved abilities in architecture, quarrying, and mining (civil engineering, generally); explained perhaps by some combination of "Armok made them that way because it pleased him to do so" (i.e., tags in the raws) and a generally handwaved explanation that dwarven engineering proceeded in continual development from Roman-era skills to late Medieval-level skills without the intervening thousand years or so of "dark ages".  Having a community of weird short folks in the hills that have even finely-honed late Roman engineering skills in a setting where most of the human communities are dealing with, say, 1100s continental peasant skill levels naturally has a lot of mythic-grade results come out without even having to invoke any magic or exotic materials. 

Another, perhaps even simpler, take that would quickly result in increased realism of both the worldgen and fortress mode bridges would be to have a third type of bridge, "static", that works identically to the existing types do when down, but cannot be linked to a lever to raise it.  Additionally, the materials requirement and construction time for bridges would go up non-linearly with length; a bridge 10 dwarf-squares long should be considerably more than five times as hard as one 2 dwarf-squares long.  Note that when you look at it from a DF view, the Untertorbrücke is really three 8 dwarf-square long static bridges between columns (and originally had an additional several square long raising drawbridge off the end as part of the fortifications, now filled in), because they were unable to span it with two 12 square bridges. 

One fairly interesting way to handle both the default DF world and various mods would be to have the material and design requirements for a static bridge based on the compressive strength of the material selected; and the material and design requirements for a retracting or raising bridge based on the tensile strength of the material selected, in addition to a cumulative length factor.  By relatively easy tuning of only three or four new numerical parameters per world (in one of the raw files), and the use of existing material information, you could very quickly get something with very interesting results.  Hiring dwarves with access to iron or steel suddenly becomes even more valuable if you want that trendy fireproof raising drawbridge.  The infamous soap constructions would become far less practical by default, yet those wanting a much sillier fantasy world could either increase the stats on soap, or reduce the material-strength-factor value for their world in the raws.  (It could be argued that many fantasy world constructions and illustrations can be rationally explained by a combination of having a much lower exponent for material strength, and ready access to Legendary Architects; all those slender spires and leaping stone arches simply fall out of a couple of equation parameter changes, in a triumph of procedural design.) 

[Armok]

what about those bridges some cities have with a load of houses ON the bridge so you don't even notice you're on a bridge not just a  normal street when you're walking over it?

[darkflagrance]

@ Miuramir

We already have a way to explain naturally higher dwarven architecture, masonry, forging etc. skills: the natural skill tag in the raws allows all members of a race to start with higher levels in certain skills. I imagine that when dwarves are no longer the primary race and humans/elves are playable too, the natural skill tags will be invoked to differentiate the playing experiences of the various races.