Dwarf Fortress > DF Suggestions
Lighting and oxygen, or architectural freedom vs botanical realism
GoblinCookie:
Doors seem a big issue here. Once we implement oxygen then solid doors become quite a problem for dwarves. It seems that internal doors to fortresses would likely be made of cloth, or they would be woven together.
--- Quote from: SixOfSpades on June 19, 2018, 04:52:08 am ---As has obviously been mentioned before, caverns (or at least those with life) clearly have oxygen, but I just thought I'd point out that their current game implementation strongly suggests that they have oxygen without any sort of connection to the surface world. Posters trying to make cavern mechanics be more in line with real-world behavior have suggested that oxygen could get into caverns through minute cracks in the stone, or be dissolved into surface streams that then flow underground (or seep in as groundwater), and I don't blame them. But the act of breaching a cavern, which suddenly allows cavern spores to grow in all connected subterranean soil tiles, clearly implies that now there is airflow to the cavern, where previously there wasn't.
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Lots of caverns in RL have no connection to the surface world but still have oxygen. They have oxygen because the water that flows into the caverns has oxygen dissolved into it, oxygen that is then released into the caverns. There is actually no reason why oxygen cannot remain dissolved into the water for millions of years and then be released when it flows into a cavern. In order to get to lots of caverns you have to swim through an underground lake, actually there is probably a whole world of underground caverns with lifeforms entirely unknown because it is so difficult to get to their location.
SixOfSpades:
--- Quote from: Starver on June 19, 2018, 05:41:59 am ---Sub-tile ventilation (like holes drilled in walls) will also make for sub-tile leakage of water/magma flow in instances where it wouldn't currently be expected.
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With the operative word being "currently". Under the natural assumption that both the door and air vent open onto the same hallway, it's pretty much a given that any water/magma high enough to reach the vent would have leaked under the door well before that point. It's not terribly realistic that every single door in the fort is both magma-safe and watertight, after all.
--- Quote ---Right now, I'd prefer hand-waved ventilation (. . . maybe setting up 'flow zones' to encourage circulation and air-mixing . . .) than the full complexity of having to manually install(/assign to be installed) a whole complex ducting arrangements
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Well, the "complexity" would depend on the design of your fortress, and it needn't be anything like ventilating every single room. You might have, say, one major central staircase, ringed by a hallway at every level, and all other major rooms open directly onto a hallway. In a case like that, you can just ventilate the crap out of the central stair, and let the oxygen dissipate--as long as it doesn't have to go too far, or through multiple closed doors, to reach nearly any point in the fort.
--- Quote from: GoblinCookie on June 19, 2018, 06:16:23 am ---Doors seem a big issue here. Once we implement oxygen then solid doors become quite a problem for dwarves.
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Tolkien's dwarves were clearly able to make doors that fit absolutely perfectly, but that doesn't mean that all doors have to be airtight. If the masons knew that self-sealing bedroom doors would almost certainly kill their users, then naturally they'd want to leave small but sufficient gaps. Besides, it's a lot easier to open & close doors quietly if they don't make full contact with the sill and doorjamb. If I were a dwarf, I don't imagine I'd get much sleep in a hallway that's constantly filled with the noise of stone scraping on stone from all the comings & goings.
Where airtight doors made sense, conversely, would be rooms where you want to discourage life, such as food stockpiles. Maybe you could carry 2 torches when you enter, but leave one still burning behind you when you go, so it leaves less oxygen for the vermin? At the very least, sealed doors would keep new vermin from getting in.
--- Quote from: Bumber on June 19, 2018, 05:54:03 am ---I'm not sure the bellows are practical. To move the air throughout the whole fort would require a great deal of pressure, which neither the bellow materials nor the piping are really up to.
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You may be right, but I disagree about requiring high pressure: it's only air, after all, and it doesn't need to be moving anything like fast. Additional measures, of course, may still be required to avoid unhappy thoughts around particularly stinky places, like tanneries.
--- Quote ---You could have large shafts with a bunch of fans connected by a vertical axle. Would it be going too far to let them be used for geothermal power?
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Not in my book. I figure that if anybody's going to invent steam turbines, it's dwarves.
Bumber:
Doors could have built-in vents that are able to be set to open/close from the 'q' menu. With open vents you'd risk water and poisonous gas flowing through. With them closed, you'd need an alternate means of providing oxygen to the room.
--- Quote from: SixOfSpades on June 19, 2018, 08:44:40 pm ---
--- Quote from: Bumber on June 19, 2018, 05:54:03 am ---I'm not sure the bellows are practical. To move the air throughout the whole fort would require a great deal of pressure, which neither the bellow materials nor the piping are really up to.
--- End quote ---
You may be right, but I disagree about requiring high pressure: it's only air, after all, and it doesn't need to be moving anything like fast.
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It has to keep pace with 100+ dwarves. (Some players go above 1000.) It also needs to get to all the nooks and crannies of the fort, which means you either need to run ventilation ducts there (requiring pressure so it actually reaches all the exit points,) or you need to do an extra good job of oxygenating the main areas so the air can diffuse throughout the fort. Fans are at an advantage because you can use a bunch of them to induce a continuous flow. Bellows waste half their effort filling up.
Starver:
--- Quote from: SixOfSpades on June 19, 2018, 08:44:40 pm ---Under the natural assumption that both the door and air vent open onto the same hallway,
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[citation needed]
That'd seem to me to be the worst way to do it, under a truly realism-based system, given any other options.
SixOfSpades:
--- Quote from: Bumber on June 20, 2018, 06:33:53 am ---Doors could have built-in vents that are able to be set to open/close from the 'q' menu. With open vents you'd risk water and poisonous gas flowing through. With them closed, you'd need an alternate means of providing oxygen to the room.
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Or, dwarves could assume that if there's enough !!FUN!! to fill the corridors with water or toxic gas, then they're pretty much screwed anyway. To me, it seems analogous to building a fallout shelter in your basement: Yeah, it might come in useful someday, but if your city does get nuked, chances are you're fuckin' dead, fallout shelter or not.
--- Quote from: SixOfSpades on June 19, 2018, 08:44:40 pm ---It [any ventilation system] has to keep pace with 100+ dwarves. (Some players go above 1000.) It also needs to get to all the nooks and crannies of the fort, which means you either need to run ventilation ducts there (requiring pressure so it actually reaches all the exit points,) or you need to do an extra good job of oxygenating the main areas so the air can diffuse throughout the fort.
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I'm of the "extra good job of oxygenating the main areas" camp, just ventilate the highest-traffic areas and let homogenization do the rest. Since gases diffuse themselves to be of equal concentrations among all connected areas, I think the cracks under doors + doors not being closed all the time should be enough. Of course, whether or not these areas are lit by fire will most likely prove to be an overriding factor.
--- Quote ---Fans are at an advantage because you can use a bunch of them to induce a continuous flow. Bellows waste half their effort filling up.
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I don't mind bellows being sub-optimal: One of the key factors of the Innovations plan is that the player does NOT choose what gets discovered/invented, so in one game you might embark with a civilization that happened to develop Fans, while in your next game you have nothing better than the Great Bellows (but with a chance to develop Fans afterward). I'm not saying Bellows need to be a thing, I'm just saying that multiple games will be more interesting if different forts know different technologies, and half-measures like Bellows would be useful in that regard.
--- Quote from: Starver on June 20, 2018, 07:21:12 am ---
--- Quote from: SixOfSpades on June 19, 2018, 08:44:40 pm ---Under the natural assumption that both the door and air vent open onto the same hallway,
--- End quote ---
That'd seem to me to be the worst way to do it, under a truly realism-based system, given any other options.
--- End quote ---
What's so terrible about venting into the hallway? Do you have a grudge against transom windows or something? Yeah, you could dig (or drill) a separate access path for ventilation alone, but that seems like a lot of extra work. What's wrong with air flowing along the same paths as traffic?
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