Bay 12 Games Forum

At the moment, water completely cuts off access to areas if it's deep enough, we need a water pathing system.

First of all, water is dangerous and pathing through water is complex, most likely eating up more cpu cycles. There should be a toggle option in the 'o'rders like "Dwarves can swim/Dwarves stay out of water."

Now on to how I think the pathing would work. There's several factors: how much air the dwarf has, how much energy it has to swim, and air pockets. When a dwarf has to path through water, the pathfinding system would first make a direct path to the job site, and then map out air pockets on the way there and turning them into "checkpoints." The dwarves would traverse between these checkpoints and stop for air or to rest on the way to the job site, without canceling their current task. This would work something like this: When a dwarf gets low on air/energy it would start to get nervous and would decide if it can make it to the checkpoint or if it should turn back. The dwarves would only get nervous when they have just enough air to go back. A nervous dwarf would go back to the previous air pocket, cancel the job, and path out of the water to get to whatever else they need to be doing. If a dwarf thinks it has enough air to get to the next checkpoint when it's nervous, it would go ahead and go on to the next checkpoint. The dwarf would repeat the process until it gets to the job site or gives up at a certain checkpoint.

Novice swimmers should be able to know if a part they path through will make them panic and refuse to path through it. If there was a sudden change in water level or anything else that interferes with it's ability to safely path somewhere, it should cancel the current task and attempt to find the nearest air-pocket. IOW the water pathing system should adapt to changes in the environment in a similar way to the land pathing system when a door that is required to access an area is suddenly locked.



Also, I think certain jobs should actually be able to be completed under water. I can't imagine why the hell you'd want to complete a workshop job underwater rather than building a workshop on the surface, but what game are we playing again? DWARF FORTRESS! So, ahem, I'll go into that. Some jobs, like forging, definitely can't be done underwater so this could be a problem. IIRC all items that can be created are already in the RAWS so there could be a [DOABLE_WATER] token to define workshop jobs that can be completed under water. Like when swimming to the next checkpoint, dwarves could get nervous while attempting an underwater job, and if they didn't have enough air to complete it, would give up. Besides workshop jobs, I'm certain most other tasks like construction and deconstruction could easily be accomplished underwater, with the possible exception of mining/carving stone, and woodcutting, due to the friction underwater. WHY do you have underwater trees anyway?!

Currently a way to train swimming isn't even officially implemented. I'm not entirely sure how it could, but I'm thinking of something like designating a meeting hall over water. Your dwarves would swim around in it in their spare time. If the water level is higher than 4 though, non-swimmers would refuse to get in as they'd panic. And then there's the possibility of a dwarf absolutely hating water, but I won't get into that.

Giant digger wasps in caves or chasms would be BADASS. Imagine one of your dwarves having some eggs implanted in them. If you recovered the dwarf before it was carried off to a nearby cave you'd have to quarantine it or treat it somehow. It's condition would rapidly deteriorate causing some seriously unhappy thoughts. After their body is sufficiently damaged they would inevitably die and release deadly swarms of wasps (while technically young they'd be young giant wasps ]at a certain point of decay to unleash terror on your dwarves. The wasps could hole themselves up in some part of your fortress if you manage to ward them off and could create more nests to unleash even more terror on you at a later point, possibly producing more full grown wasps capable of infecting more dwarves. You'd end up with infected areas all over the fort that you'd have to seal off, or deal with.

The Fun doesn't stop there, no! If the afflicted dwarf goes melancholy before it dies and decides to take a swim in your cistern or some other difficult to reach place you'd better hurry your ass up and get that corpse back, or seal the area off entirely. If you bother to make tombs for these poor souls it's not going to be much more extravagant than a hastily dug out chamber you can seal off forever before wasps start swarming out of the corpse.

So what do you think?

I've thought up a challenge in DF. It's simple. Don't use the labors menu. Ever. You use what you get, if your only miner gets killed, too bad, hope you can survive until you get another one. Your farmer died? Oh well, guess you're going to have to acquire a taste for turtle. You can draft dwarves of course, and unless you want to be REALLY hardcore, you can have them train in any weapon skill regardless of whether or not they have previous experience. Basically, the challenge should really force you to improvise when a bunch of civilian dwarves get killed in a siege, to emphasize the crisis.

What are your thoughts on this?

I had an idea for what to do with prisoners... Force them to path through a deadly labyrinth of traps and horrors, and see how many survive! In order to keep them from all taking the same path, you could use simple dwarfputer tech to open/close floodgates at intersections, creating a stoplight sort of system. You could also rig up spikes and drawbridges up to a similar system, heh. Survivors could be rewarded with an extravagant cage to live in while your dwarves gawk at them.

Post ideas for making a labyrinth here, and if anyone ever makes one, upload a movie of it in action!

Here's a few of my own ideas:

• Pit traps to completely trap it's victims, or alternatively a different part of the labyrinth.
• Use water to push your prisoners through a complex network of pipes, perhaps launching them out a cliffside or leading to areas of the labyrinth. Whether or not they survive is your choice.

It might just be me, but I think of dwarves as generally lawful creatures. The ETHICS in the raws seem to confirm that. I think these kind of get in the way though, "slavery" for example probably wouldn't be accepted by the dwarves despite how awesome that would be. You should be able to start two different types of fortresses: a standard lawful fortress, and a "rogue fortress," which would act as a sort of refuge for criminals and an (more or less) organized crime center. The major things that would probably be different in a rogue fortress would be ethics, immigrants, diplomacy, nobles and the fortress would maintain a steady level of chaos.

So what does everyone think about this?

Sometimes I need to make a stock pile that isn't a perfect rectangle, without making several sections of it and cluttering the place up. Currently the only way to do this is make a rectangle large enough to encompass the entire area, the remove the excess. Not only is this inefficient, it tends to overwrite other stockpiles nearby. It would be nice if there was an option to e(x)tend a stockpile through the set building tasks (q) menu when you highlight a stock pile. Basically you'd just be adding to the selected stockpile.

Also, if I make a furniture stockpile that only accepts mechanisms it'd make sense for it to appear as a "mechanism" stockpile. This is very minor though.

Finding skilled candidates for a job based on a dwarf's favored items and materials, and browsing your dwarf's thoughts is a pretty manual task. I think it'd be nice if there was a thoughts/personality traits menu, where you could browse any thoughts/traits/favored items your dwarves have and see which ones have it, all in one list and without the need to manually check every single dwarf.

Islands are great. There's something about a map with a crap load of islands on it that makes me think, "this is place is fucking awesome!" Generating worlds with a lot of islands is hard, there should be an islandism parameter or something, because worlds that have too high a volcanism setting are rejected. Archipelagos would be great, starting a fortress on an archipelago would be the best. Or maybe it wouldn't, but I have this thing with islands. Besides continental islands, some smaller islands nearby continental islands which might not even show up on the region map would make sense. Starting a fortress on a barren ~25x25 size island in the middle of an ocean would be good for lulz.

And what about icebergs? I'm not entirely sure how they'd be useful but the DF community is ingenious enough to figure something out... I suppose they could crash through your constructions, but the pathing issues with moving objects remain, so they would have to be stationary. Specific types of wildlife could flock to them I guess.

I wrote a pretty extensive introduction for a community fort I was planning but I gave up after a while. Anyways, I thought I'd share it. It's a first draft and there could be some major inconsistencies and things I overlooked, but if you have time to read it all let me know what you think, if anyone finds it particularly interesting I might finish it, revise it and start a community fort.

It is said that there was once a Golden Age. In the Golden Age there were three great dwarven nations. They were at peace with each other but they kept to their own affairs most of the time and prospered. It is said that for ages the elves had attacked our nation, The Incinerated Shields and the two greater nations whose names have been forgotten, as their interests were in direct conflict with Dwarfkind, ending the Golden Age and beginning the Great War. They cherish the lush forests and the verdant plains of this world more than any other race. So much that they refuse to kill a single creature or destroy a single tree.

Wood is an extraordinary material that dwarves have been using for as long as anyone can recall. It is light and easily manipulated, and is quite strong, and the elves hate us for the sheer number of trees we've "slaughtered." But they're all bigoted fools, they're born and die that way. Dwarfkind has created the most glorious crafts and weapons in all the world and has inspired uncountable legends because them of them. It is the dream of every dwarf to have their own place in the written and unwritten fables of the world. Many a dwarven child has wanted to create something so magnificent that they themselves would revere it, as well as every being that had the privelage to lay eyes upon it. This is the cause of all dwarves, to create, so that they may have something to be remembered by. The putrid elves insulted every dwarf that has been and will be by attempting to deny us the material we need to fulfill our destinies, and we hate them as we hate no other creature.

The two greatest nations had underestimated the power of nature when they declared war on the elves. After five years the second greatest nation had been dissolved, the capital had been invaded and the peasants all fled into the wilderness. This drastically reduced the power of the dwarven force, The Incinerated Shields is said to have withdrawn it's troops so that it could defend it's colonies, which had only been recently discovered by the elves. The fabled greatest nation had lost it's greatest ally and it's lesser ally had abandoned it because of this. Many fled the towns and cities of the greatest nation and what was left of the defense was pathetic.

It is said that throughout the war our nation had kept the location of our capital a fiercely guarded secret and it had not been attacked throughout the course of the war. After the two nations fell and every colony of ours had been dissolved, the races of the world thought the dwarven race had been anihilated and the elves returned to their forest retreats. The remaining citizens of The Incinerated Shield could do nothing but hide away in fear. After so long the futility of the dwarven race had long been accepted as fact, so much that it was taken for granted. Eventually the events of the Great War and the existence of the other races became mere stories and few people believed them. The Incinerated Shield colonized the area around the capital as fast as it could, dismissing the stories of the Great War as nonsense told by fools who were afraid of change and the unknown. Even faster than we expanded, we made astounding technological discoveries, our nation had by far surpassed the power the Greatest Nation was said to have had during the Golden Age.

The stories of the Great War and the elves became much more credible after a small, insignificant outpost on the very edge of the border of our nation was attacked by an unknown force. All of the seven dwarves there had been killed, except for a hunter, Endok Gearedpillar, who escaped when he saw the slaughter from his favorite hunting spot on top of a hill. Endok, terrified, had ran towards the nearest city for three days without sleeping or stopping to rest, and when he finally arrived he flung himself on the floor in the main hallway, screaming incoherent sentences for about half a minute before falling asleep. The fortress guard had no idea where he came from and thought he was insane, so they locked him up in the prison. When Endok awoke he explained to the guard outside his cell what had happened and that he had not slept for three days. He described the invaders as being very tall, slender and agile, with pointy ears and no beards, firing strange weapons similar to a crossbow. The guard released him with hesitation and escorted him to the mayor, who he explained the story to. The mayor didn't believe Endok and had him escorted back to his cell, where he spent another day. The news of the insane dwarf had spread like wildfire among the fortress until the fort's philosopher, Urist Admiredgirder heard about the dwarf. The philosopher was well versed in the stories of the Great War and ran with all due speed towards the Mayor's office to inform him that the dwarf which had caused such a commotion was perfectly sane, and that the outpost had been attacked by the fabled elves, who hadn't in two hundred years forgot about the dwarves. The philosopher explained that their city was in peril and they must send a message to the capital if they expected to survive. The Mayor was understandably reluctant to accept the philosopher's story, but Urist was highly renowned for his work, and so the mayor sent Urist and some other dwarves to warn the capital, and recruited Endok into the Fortress Guard so he could have revenge on the elves. It is believed that everyone in the fortress was slaughtered while the messengers journeyed to the capital, the elves could not have been far behind Endok.

The king didn't believe the story Urist told much more than the mayor did but didn't have much choice but to prepare for war. Our nation had not known conflict other than civil disruptions since the Great War and had no military to speak of, and very little military technology, only guards to keep the peace. The king focused production almost entirely on war and sent members of the Fortress Guard to the nearest and most important cities, praying that it would be sufficient. Fortunately it took the elves some time to reach the heart of the nation and by that time the king had assembled a defense. When Urist left he had quickly crammed some unique ancient designs for old weapons of war that the three dwarven nations had supposedly used during the great war. These ingenious designs included crushing traps, rooms that seal and then flood with water to drown enemies, bombs made from booze, serrated rotating discs which pop out of a wall to shred into opponents, and enormous crossbows that fired bolts the size of small trees! Urist promptly handed the aged documents to the king. This, our massive production output and the sheer number of people the king drafted to defend the border is what has kept us alive for this long, though we've lost all of the outer cities.

Even the stoutest dwarves cried out in dismay at the situation of the war: we were losing, slowly but surely. We are running out of resources and the king has sent an exploration party around The Perfect Spikes................

<I stopped writing here>