Bay 12 Games Forum

If individual dwarves worked like workshops, the labor menu would be both easier to navigate and allow prioritization.

Unlike workshops, the dwarf doesn't shuffle their current task to the bottom of their list when they finish it.  They just always do the top thing on their list, unless there's none of that to be done at the moment, in which case they do the next.

I discovered a very interesting bug.

Apparently, if you dig out the area underneath a ghost, they will float there forever, stuck.  I think it has something to do with how ghosts are flying but still think they're walking.  I accidentally got a ghostly glassmaker stuck above the ditch I'm going to use for dwarf-cleaning.  He hasn't moved a single tile in two whole seasons, I'm pretty sure that he's legitimately trapped there.  To clarify, both his tile and all the ones adjacent to him are channelled out.

So that's fact one.  Fact two is that my fortress is crawling with ghosts.

I would like to change the entrance of my fortress to be a bridge, and line it with trapped ghosts.  If I put 2-tile catwalks on the edges of the bridge, and deconstruct the tiles when ghosts are on the end points, they should be trapped there as permanent floating spooky decorations.  Does anyone know a way to lure the ghosts into position, to make this feasible?

I'm still working through your massive post, but something you mentioned earlier on made me think of a way to accomplish your goals that would be pretty simple, both to learn and probably to implement.  The rest of your ideas are probably good too, but I want to put this out there as a simple version:

Starting with your idea of plump helmets requiring a log, a seed, and some water, each plant has its own unique way to be a hassle.  Plump helmets can be reasonably harvested early on, they just take an inordinate amount of manual labor forever.  A particularly aggressive type of vine requires metal trellises.  Dimple cups release poisonous fumes unless ventilated.  Cave rice needs to be in 3/7 water and pollutes the water on harvest.  One per hundred mandrake roots is actually the top of a monster that awakens when someone pulls on his head.  Each ties in to a different dwarven industry that already has its own concerns, like metalworking, siege defense, irrigation, or military (respectively for the above examples).

Add to that the idea of pests being more common the more you use the plant.  Plump helmet pests are relatively benign - they just ruin a portion of your crop.  The other plants have more harmful pests.  Some generate lots of vermin, others generate creatures that eat your other food stocks, still others generate creatures that have an annoying poison, and some might even make tiny bugs that are on fire.

This means an early fort can use plump helmets, which are even easier than they are in current versions.  As the population grows, you need more plump helmets.  When you're growing too many plump helmets, pests kick in.  You need to diversify to two crops, so you pick whichever has the drawback you're most equipped for.  This lasts until your population grows large enough that you can't have just two crops without pests, so you do three.  The population growth forces you into the other industries, and as you near max population you have to start making some hard choices about how to support crops that have requirements completely inappropriate for your surroundings.

Squash: remember that this is per-pixel level stuff we're talking about. Most angles are not possible to draw. You have to operate on pixel increments:
one px vertically, two horizontally  <- standard pixel "near-isometric"
one px vertically, one horizontally  <- 45 degrees
one px vertically, three horizontally
and that's about it.
Oh, and I can't see your image :/

I tried this in the past with, if I recall correctly, one horizontal / two vertical on the tall sides and one vertical / two horizontal on the long sides, and it came out looking pretty good.  I only did plain tiles though, nothing fancy, so I don't know how hard it will be to make good-looking graphics (like those in your tilesets!) in those perspectives.

If you use an axonometric projection, choose your angle wisely.  Typically, you'll see a projection where the world is rotated 45 degrees about the center, then tilted 30 degrees towards the viewer (this is isometric).  Compare to cavalier, where the world is not rotated about the center, but is still tilted towards the viewer.

Isometric gives you a better view, but messes up the controls.  Cavalier is not as pretty, but doesn't cause the Q-bert control problem.  How do you get the best of both worlds?  Rotate the world a smaller amount.  If you rotate, say, 20 degrees, then you can see both sides of corners.  Pressing up will move you up and slightly to the left, pressing down will move you down and slightly to the right, and so on.  The key here is that the diagonal is slight, so visually it still makes sense what direction you're pressing on the keys.

A quick google search got me an example here:
http://sr19.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/axonometric.jpg
If you look at the tiles, you'll see that they're not a 45 degree rotation.  I'd go for an even shallower rotation than shown here, but hopefully this is enough to make it make sense.

Yeah, it is an iterative method.  It's relatively fast, though with the current speed DF runs at, adding anything is a problem.

I think you could get it in without causing much slowdown if you used the same iteration to handle this algorithm as used to handle the fluids algorithm.

That is, if the fluids algorithm used such an iteration.  At the moment it does not.  However, the fluids algorithm is also currently not a local model, which Toady said he wanted to use.  The only local model I know of requires an iteration of around 6 steps*, which would work with the suggestion of merging them.

So really, if he wanted to use a cave-in algorithm like the one I suggested, it would be best for him to wait until he redoes the fluids, then handle it at the same time.

I think having burrowing monsters that don't leave tunnels, and burrowing megabeasts that do leave tunnels, would be the best way to handle it.  Monsters should be smart enough not to mine into wet/warm tiles, but their undead versions don't need to be so timid.  This means a skeletal monster could get through your moat, but since it doesn't leave a tunnel it won't flood your fortress.  A skeletal megabeast, however, could cause horrible horrible things.

I think this is the simplest way to add below-ground threats to the game of all those I've heard of.  I like it.