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[NW_Kohaku]

Trial and error.

Not a good answer, mind you, just an obvious one.

However, such an opaque interface will cause serious problems.

Remember: Every type of stone will have different densities.  Every type of stone may have different compressive yields. 

How am I supposed to remember that Limestone walls can hold 7 other limestone walls, but only 5 of gneiss, or 6 of granite?  The number of possible permutations is extreme. 

The advantage of the "needs a support every 6 tiles" concept (with possible alternate rules for soil types) is that you can just figure out how much each stone is going to be able to carry by looking at it.  You can plan ahead by simply having a pre-set formula for how much of an angle you can build at. 

You could make that giant dining hall with more than six tiles width if you just made a sloped roof.  So long as you only go 3 over for every 1 up, you don't trigger the cave-in rules. 

That's still fairly simple, and fun because it makes you have to figure out how to build certain things without undermining what you've already built, but it doesn't require you to do material science testing on every stone in the game.

It be historically accurate...

An art historian once told me that during the middle ages, when the cities were growing more prosperous and everyone wanted one of those fancy Gothic cathedrals, their understanding of engineering was actually much poorer than the final product would suggest. she told me there's a lot of records of these buildings being almost done before the construction cracked and everything collapsed. Those buttresses you mentioned were designed out of trial and error.

Another interesting thing she told me was that because everyone wanted these buildings to be made, there were these traveling bands of masons and architects going around and offering their services. And my brain is relating this to bauhaus somehow, I think it's because bauhaus took their teaching system from these bands?

Maybe having a good architect in your fort would show estimates of the qualities of the stone as you select it for construction.

Yes, and part of why those stonemasons were so vital was because it literally took multiple lifetimes of trial-and-error, and they still had many of their cathedrals collapsing on them.  They were so secretive about their training and could demand such prices because nobody could replicate the knowledge they had without hundreds of years of trial-and-error.

... And now, we're going to tell players to spend years trying to learn materials science on game objects? 

That's simply not going to happen.  What's going to actually happen is that some small group of people are going to reverse-engineer whatever formula Toady uses, and post knowledge to the wiki, and it will basically mean that reading the wiki is absolutely mandatory reading for every single mine you dig or wall you construct.

The players revolt already at the notion of having to clean up rubble, and it's seriously hard to get people to get on board with many of the farming proposals like NPK, even when you can show how the interface can be made easy and clear for them, and even automate the process. Making players fly blind and just occasionally collapsing their whole forts on them?  They would be screaming bloody murder.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Like I said, it wasn't a good answer.

[Jeoshua]

But a fairly accurate one.

An overlay-type display of mineral densities isn't strictly required.  But it might be helpful to have some kind of feedback anyways.  Possibly, when examing a wall section closely, a small blurb about it's support could be added:

"It looks rather precarious in that postion"

"It looks solidly placed"

"One sharp breeze and this thing could topple"

... and other such phrases.  It doesn't need to be a graph, and that style fits into the game as-is already.

[GreatWyrmGold]

No need for a graph. Just have some screen (maybe 'd'esignations, or a submenu thereof?) that overlays the walls with a color or replaces the wall's normal color or blinks it or something. Blue means that it's not taking any stress at all; green that the stress is under, say, half of whatever stress it can take; yellow means less than, say, 3/4 but more than half of the max stress, orange means it's near the max, red is at or over max stress (i.e. about to cave in). Or something like that.

[NW_Kohaku]

I again say we should have transparent tile overlays.  This game is painful enough for those with epilepsy or are photosensitive. 

Having text outputs is almost as bad as not having any outputs at all, because nobody is going to go through their fort with every tile they dig to check the detailed description of every wall in their fort.  If you can't see it easily and almost immediately, it's not going to be useful. 

And again, just having a vague notion of how much stress each tile is under is not enough to tell a player who wants to know "can I build my dining hall here?"   

[Jeoshua]

Having text outputs is almost as bad as not having any outputs at all, because nobody is going to go through their fort with every tile they dig to check the detailed description of every wall in their fort.  If you can't see it easily and almost immediately, it's not going to be useful. 

But what you're looking for is a total departure from the way things are normally done in DF.  Everything is 16 color ascii, no matter how many good suggestions we make as far as options to the contrary.  Asserting that it's REQUIRED for a cave-in system just isn't true.  It is just "preferred" that there be an easy way to tell things.

Telling if your Dwarf is currently hobbling around with broken legs and a missing arm should be something very simple to tell, right?  But you still have to look at the dwarf and read its text read-out on it's physical state to do it, unless they're trailing blood (and even then, you have to look to see what's really going on).  And a wall which is about to cave in is infinitely more difficult to tell with your naked eye than a dwarf with a missing leg and a caved in skull.  Yet the game doesn't just tell you the Dwarf is injured in any simple way, not even a red color overlay.

So while it would be nice in so many ways if there were colored overlays, there are so many counter-examples of complex and very life-or-death things that aren't displayed in any coherent way in the game as-is.

[GreatWyrmGold]

So...because the display is inadequate in some ways, it has to stick to exactly like it currently is? Riiight.

An expanded color thingy sounds useful for many things.

[Jeoshua]

For LOTS of things, surely.  But it's an entirely separate fish to fry, in my opinion.

[NW_Kohaku]

I would point out that there are on-map icons displaying dwarf statuses, like hunger or being tired or having very low happiness, and even one designating fatal wounds.  Making a "significantly injured" icon to go along with the flashing mortal wound icon would be a decent idea, as well. 

The thing is, people can often have dwarves that have non-critical injuries without ever realizing it, even when they're looking straight at them, and it is a problem.

Especially if the main reason Toady has given is that there needs to be a way to easily convey the information to the player, then talking about this in Interface terms is entirely appropriate.

[Jeoshua]

One "interface" concern could be this:

If a Dwarf is told to mine out a tile, a quick calculation is made of what will happen to the surrounding area when he does.  If it's determined that mining out a tile will cause a cave-in, the dig job gets canceled just as it would when the Dwarf is told to dig into a reservoir of water or magma.

Urist McMiner cancels dig: Unstable Stone.

You could then place a column or some other kind of support and try again, or just tell the Dwarf to mine it anyways and see what happens.  If you shore up the walls and add supports, the next time you dig it it might not fall through.

This way the Dwarves seem to know what's going on, even if you as a player don't.

[NW_Kohaku]

The same would need to happen for a construction, as well...

This seems fairly complex, and I think part of the original purpose was that you have to figure it out yourself, but this is at least a fairly reasonable way to do this...

Still, I worry that having each material have their own shear yield and compression yield values determining whether or not they will collapse if you try to make a floor out of them will be too esoteric for most people trying to make constructions.  Even with an as-you-construct indicator that "this material can be built as a floor 3 tiles away from the nearest wall" it would be strange.

[Jeoshua]

Urist McArchitect cancels build: Unstable
Urist McArchitect cancels deconstruct building: Unstable

That could work, too.  Trying to build something too far out and with no support, like a floor tile, could cause that message to pop up.

Maybe the wording could be changed but the basic idea is that if you were getting messages like that, you'd immediately know that something was wrong with what you're trying to construct.  Going one z-level down and building a support SHOULD be good enough to solve the problem.  In many cases (such as making bridges), it might actually be possible to remove the supports after the bridge spans a certain area. 

As far as it being complicated to remember what you can build with, remember that although any material CAN have different physical properties, the materials as they currently stand and are defined in the raws are overwhelmingly four different types:

STONE_TEMPLATE
METAL_TEMPLATE
WOOD_TEMPLATE
SOIL_TEMPLATE

Their values are taken from that material template and unless variations are given, they are otherwise all identical.  And as it stands, SOIL_TEMPLATE is functionally identical to STONE_TEMPLATE.  Obsidian and Adamantine do have unique values, as well they should, and would be a special case.  So would animal bone and rope and what-not.  But Orthoclase, Granite, Basalt, and nearly all the minerals and layer stones have exactly the same properties.  As far as building is concerned, using COMPRESSIVE_YIELD/FRACTURE as the value, Steel and Gold would build just the same.

Adamantine would be far-and-away the best thing to build with, since it is light and unyielding.

[NW_Kohaku]

Yeah, the whole notion of "unobtainium" as a joke came from aeronautical engineering in particular, where they would declare "this plane would be possible if we could build it out of a material that weighs nothing and is infinitely strong". 

The thing is, you don't have to build stuff from the same material - you can make a building of wood at the top, steel in the middle, and then a big fat stone foundation at the bottom to bear the weight. 

However, that's the problem with having these different material types - you would need to understand the difference between how thick a steel wall you need if you put more steel on top of it, versus if you put wood on all the floors above that.

[Jeoshua]

There would be different levels of "understanding" of course.  For some people it would be good enough to understand "Metal is heavy.  Wood probably won't support it".  For others, they would wish to know the precise amount of stress that it could take down to the Urist of Force, so they could do as much as possible with as little material as possible.

With a job cancellation system that triggers when the next piece just won't work as you've tried to place it, the feedback loop would be pretty self-explanatory.  Build the wall of the z-level you're working on.  It works.  Okay now build the floor.  Oops! That middle tile got canceled.  I'd better see if I can add a support beneath it.  Okay that works now.  Next Z-level.  Etc.

[NW_Kohaku]

Yeah, but I think many people would get frustrated to find that they can only get 3 floors up their stone castle walls before they have to start redesigning their whole castle because they need thicker walls.  Then, their barracks doesn't fit, so they have to redesign that. 

Remember that the whole fort may easily be stacked on top of itself vertically (that's what central stairwells often mean), so you'd hit a point where players might find it impossible to excavate any lower levels without collapsing their whole fort.

That could easily cause serious frustration.