Bay 12 Games Forum

Oh... how I'll miss those books.

Don't be all down like now, another one is coming this fall.

Like Kohaku, I use the minimap for letting me know when a dangerous creature's close to my fort. Even if the minimap got a resolution upgrade, I can't really imagine using it for anything else.

Well, imagine it as a separate view pane with independent scale. The basic idea of knowing where you are in a horizontally sprawling fort is useful, but if you could add overlays independently (such as the depot access overlay, or the suggested structural overlays, room value, outside/inside, temperature, etc.)

Could be very fancy!

Quote from: Untelligent

How far out will this entity sprawl, er, sprawl? Will cottages and hamlets start to pop up somewhat far from the city centers? Will we get an indication of sprawl on the embark screen -- perhaps an additional local map screen, similar to the relative elevation and steepness screens? Will we even be able to embark on the sprawl, or will the majority population and their homes be too abstract to actually create for now?

It depends.  Many of the villages I've been reading about have their buildings centralized, but there are examples of villages with homesteads spread out as well.  Fields and pastures will spread out in any case, and I haven't settled on a display there.  I'm not really satisfied with the picture I put up, since it is quite monotonous, especially if a village only ends up eating a 1/4th of its square with tilled land.  On the other hand, the embark screen's local squares could show the tilled land more reliably, and those pictures could just replace the terrain tile, which would no longer be accurate itself.  Once the adv mode maps are in, it won't be too abstract to realize, and I'm hoping to get to the basics this time around, but embarking on dwarf mode would need to be restricted then, especially in towns, as you'd just have too many people.  The focus of the viewpoint on the adventurer gives me more ways to deal with lots of people in that mode, and embarking on towns has always been sorta silly anyway, since they don't react to your presence.

Here are a few ways to think about placing sprawl, including diversifying the sprawl:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_place_theory http://geography.about.com/od/urbaneconomicgeography/a/centralplace.htm
Summary: How close and how many of each size of community, in what general distribution (assuming no terrain factors). Each size of community up is 1/3 as frequent. An equivalent principal for area of communities (1/4) and administration (1/7).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_village
Summary: Sprawl shouldn't be uniform, but instead follow and concentrate on pre-existing roads (or transport features like rivers and shorelines-- I note your example does this, but that may be due to the plains being placed there.) (see also, induced demand)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentric_zone_model
Summary: The travel time to the central market determines what it is profitable to do. Milk needs to be produced very close to consumption because it spoils in travel. Therefore dairys will be in the first ring of sprawl, must charge more for milk per volume than grain(or other transportables), and can afford to pay more for land). You could work out a terrain-based time to market using something like a least-cost path.

Apparently I still had leftover children to go insane after this! Err. Child. I had child leftover. 

Arg! I just sigged someone else 30s ago.

An exceptional thread.

While underlying rock is important in generating soils, recent glaciology is critical and often mixes things up substantially. Only in tropical soils and very thin soils are you likely to always have a strong relationship between underlying rock and soil.

I don't actually recall hearing about glaciers and their effects on soil forming, or how soils are chosen in game.

A long tunnel will only work with unpresurised water. If it gets to 7/7, the water will just teleport.

I've had decent luck in a very large room with a 1 tile wide drain pouring in from the cieling, flowing from a river not under pressure, from a z level above. The water will spread out and evap before it reaches the sides (Big room). But yes, FPS hell.

Was it this one?

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=42111.msg769338#msg769338

It was, I bow to your bridge-flinging mastery.

there was a good thread about a year ago on the spread of rocks (or other things) thrown via bridges, in terms of both how high, how far, and how likely.

They did multiple repetitions with 100s of stones.

I can't find it with a few searches, but it is out there Nice diagrams too.