Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm not quite old enough to have a truly dwarfy beard yet... All I can manage is a little chin fuzz. And a cool 'stache.

I like this idea, so I did a little GIMP magic and created examples for both the depth-by-darkening effect, and the depth-by-fog effect that a previous poster mentioned. I use a fairly large tileset, so the images are pretty big.

Depth by darkening:

Depth by fog:

Quote from: Maggarg - Eater of chicke on December 26, 2008, 04:48:23 pm

Actually, you just reminded me what I want to buy with my monies.
Lego.
I'm 17 years old and over 6 feet tall, but I'll still play with lego on the carpet.

Hell, I'm 23 and still have to be told every paycheck not to blow it all on Transformers and Lego. Just because you get older doesn't mean that it gets any less awesome. I have about 3 boxes full of loose bricks, each box being about 1.5 metres long and 50cm tall. Really into the Star Wars Lego stuff right now. Star Wars Transformers, less so. Waiting for the next wave of Marvel Transformers to hit though 

Never grow old, Bay 12 Games!

I'm exactly the same... 17 and still play with LEGOs all the time. I think LEGO freaks are naturally drawn to DF because of the building aspect of the game.

 Marry Christmas. If you find offense to that, please take some cookies. This ain't about religion. This is the one part of the year where we wish merryment on very other person on the planet with no restrictions. Do you REALLY want to take that away?

 If so, you are even more of a scrooge than rich bastards. Their sucking of fun is only a byproduct of their greed. Yours would be the point.

 Even so, merry Christmas.

Right on. Screw political correctness; it's been called Christmas here for centuries, and it's become as much a cultural holiday as a religious one (I'm a Christian myself, but I acknowledge that nobody really knows the date of Christ's birth; what we call Christmas was mostly copied from ancient pagan celebrations.)

With all of the new material properties, will it be possible for the bones and leather of different creatures to have different properties when used as items? Would dragon hide armor be better than steel? Would certain creatures' bones make better bolts?

[COLOR_PATTERN:IRIS_EYE_YELLOW_GREEN]

My eyes are strange, they are mostly yellow with a green border, but change colour if I go outdoors to blue instead of green.

Mine are exactly the same...

Soo.. instead of using actual liquid in the tile your proposing a conversion system shoe horned in eating clock cycles in order to check if any tile has more than 10 of something then convert those 10 items into 1 tile depth of water?

Is the game running to fast for you?

It won't check every frame, only when the quantity of items in a tile is changed. As you stated before, it isn't possible to use actual liquid in the tile.

As the new raw format clearly shows, DF is moving toward greater realism and modding potential. Most of the suggestions that I make in this thread likely will be eventually implemented, but this thread is not so much about proposing new ideas as it is about detailing a way for these ideas to work. I am referring to 1) proper stacking/splitting mechanics and alloy ratios and 2) a unification of the liquid materials in the raws and the fluid mechanics of water and magma. These two concepts actually go somewhat hand-in-hand, as I will show:

Stacking Mechanics

One of the biggest complaints on the forums is the lack of proper ratios in alloy-making: for example, bronze is usually 10% tin and 90% copper, but the game combines copper and tin 50/50 to create bronze. With the way metal bars work now, it would be ridiculous to require 9 bars of copper to every 1 bar of tin to create bronze. The only alternative would be to be able to "break off" 10% of a bar to use in the alloy, but that would be incredibly difficult to keep track of...

...or would it?

Actually, if stacking mechanics were properly fixed, this would work very well, and not be annoying at all. The problem with stacks currently is that infinite items can stack in one tile, and once a stack is split it can never be recombined. The fact that most raw material items (stone, metal, wood, etc.) use the tile as their smallest unit is also somewhat limiting.

The solution to this is twofold. First, stacks should be limited to 10 items in a tile (any mixture of items can be in a tile, but the total size cannot be greater than 10), and most "raw material" items should start as stacks of 10. That is, when you mine out a tile, instead of "Gabbro" you should get "10/10 Gabbro", and when you smelt 10 Native Copper you should get 10 Copper Bars. This makes sense if you think about it: when you mine out a tile of rock, you shouldn't create one huge boulder. but a bunch of rock fragments. Second, dwarves with a particular labor enabled ("Organizing", maybe?) should combine stacks in stockpiles, and perhaps also clear rocks and clutter out of walkways, combine coin stacks, etc.

A dwarf can carry up to 10 of an item at once, but it must be all the same item--a dwarf can't carry 4 stone and 6 metal bars at the same time. Stacks of 10 items work exactly the same as the raw materials work now--that is, you need 10 stone to make a chair, etc. Wood logs are a special case; 1 wood log is treated as 10 wood, but the entire log is consumed if it is used to make anything. A log can be split into 10/10 wood if it is put through a sawmill (a new item similar to a millstone, requiring power), and this will make wood usage more efficient (for example, you can use 7 wood instead of an entire log to make a chair.)

Most items (weapons, clothing, etc.) take up 1/10 space, so you can stack up to 10 items in a tile, but a dwarf can only carry one of the items at a time. If more than 10 items are dropped in a tile (like if a wagon drops its load), the items spread out randomly to adjacent tiles, using a system similar to fluid mechanics. This will effectively remove "quantum stockpiles" created by designating dump sites.

Fluid Mechanics

Currently, the only liquids that can flow are water and magma. All materials have melting points, but melting a piece of granite gives the item "molten granite" rather than a tile of 1/7 magma. Toady has stated that he intends to create effects like rivers of blood in evil areas, so he obviously intends to unify the liquid mechanics somehow. Here's a way I think it could be done, by incorporating the previously mentioned stacking system.

Liquids in a tile that are not concentrated enough to equal 1/7 tile of said liquid use the 10-piece stacking mechanic that I previously mentioned. When you get 10/10 of a liquid item in a tile, it becomes a flow of 1/7 of that liquid. For simplicity, flows cannot be reduced back into individual items unless a dwarf collects the liquid with a waterskin, vial, etc.

You should be able to designate any liquid to be collected using a vial, waterskin or bucket, and any liquid to be placed on any tile using said items. The first would work similarly to sand collecting; you would use something like an activity zone if you want a dwarf to collect water, blood, slime, etc. and store it in a container. The second would be a little more complicated. You should be able to designate any tile to be filled with any liquid, in any concentration (from a smear of it to 7/7 fill). Dwarves will take buckets to the nearest source of said liquid (or use vials and waterskins if it is present in small amounts, like blood) and start dumping it on the designated tiles.

Designating the dumping of liquids could have a myriad of uses. For starters, it would finally allow the lakes of alcohol or fountains of blood that people have theorized about on the forums. You could also smear blood on the walls of your fortress to "decorate" it, or (if you're playing as a race that can survive in magma) dump buckets of magma on intruders, or spread a flammable substance like oil all along the main hallway of your fortress and then light it when the goblins arrive. The possibilities are endless.

Water and magma should be defined in the raws, and should be replaceable with anything else imaginable. Not only will this allow the aforementioned rivers of blood, but it will allow for bizarre worlds such as one based off of Jupiter's moon Titan, with seas of liquid methane. You could create creatures that drink something other than water. (Do fire imps drink magma? Breathe magma?) And I'm sure there are lots of other possibilities that I haven't even thought of.

Mixing of liquids should be handled in two ways: first, some liquids should be able to combine into more generic liquids--all forms of molten rock become simply "magma" when combined, all types of alcohol should become a generic "mixed alcohol," etc. Materials that do not have defined combinations should not be able to mix. Whichever of the two materials is the densest or most viscous should both sink to the bottom and displace the other material--the lighter liquid will treat tiles of the denser liquid as solid walls (even 1/7 tiles, for simplicity).