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[Areyar]

I hope you like these ideas, I'm sure they are not totally novel.

I found it silly to have stones sit in neat rows in a pile: they should be a rough heap.
The dump heap 'cheat' is equally silly, but in the oposite extreme: such a large number of big boulders should spill and be in the way.

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1) Landfill.
Have stone stacking (ex: in a dump-zone) consolidate into a solid heap of agregate when more than seven are on the tile.
The rocks lose their individual qualities, and lots of rock is lost forever, but it does provide a new means to create artificial landscape besides construction.
(Other dumped stuff that happens to be in the same tile will likely be lost as well...not living creatures surely)
It would be like non-arable soil for engraving purposes.
Maybe add spontaneous spilling over to adjacent tiles to form 'ramps' before being consolidated.

This thought led me to this next suggestion:

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2)stockpile 'spillage heap' option (stacking):

Have rocks and other 'big-stuff' take up space in a tile,
...have 7/7 bigthings in a tile and it is impassable,
but walkable the next level up.
(Different from the previous suggestion, the items in the heap remain seperate items.)

Stockpile tiles can contain 0-4 pieces of 'bigstuff'.
When all adjacent tiles of a single tile have reached level 4/7, it can now contail 7/7.
A stack of 0-4 stuff counts as a ramp, a 4+ stuff tile counts as impassable on ground level, but creates a virtual floor one level up.
Other neighboring non-stockpile, impassable and solid tiles count as being 4+ for this purpose.

Result: stockpiles can now countain lots more crap, but crap becomes increasingly difficult to retrieve as it gets burried in more crap.
It also becomes an impediment to traffic if badly planned.

movement hazard! Heaps should be difficult to traverse, causing dwarves to stumble and fall.

[Sevrun]

Could also serve as an easily raised bulwark if someone breaches your stronghold.  they'd have to climb over it which would slow them down...  more bolts in thier buttocks!

[Areyar]

lol
cool secondary idea  

"The Magmaman is aproaching!"
"man the barricades!"
"oi, oi!!"
"aiee!" <screaching>

aftermath:
"who's smart idea was it to use booze barrels for the barricade?"
"Well me, Ultick and As we were just taking a sip when you started shouting, so we jus'...uh? Is that roast dog I smell?"

[PTTG??]

I posted a similar suggestion a few months ago. My idea called  for there to be a weight limit of a couple hundred Dwarf-lbs. If an item is placed in a tile that takes it over the weight limit, that tile becomes "full" and is impassable. Any items that fall on it later first check for a neighboring tile, an if they are all  "full" it stacks on top of the first tile, thus creating pyramidal stacks of rubble, garbage, ect. Creature weight limits would also be included, and heavy traffic and garbage would jam small corridors. My favorite side effect would be that corridors could fill with corpses, and especialy large goblin sieges would create low walls of goblin corpses around the entrance that would need to be scrambled over by the next wave. The problem was changing the structure of the tiles and pathing, and I'm sure there where some other problems, but I can't remember what they where.

[Areyar]

That's the thing with good ideas: they don't go away.
There's always someone supersmart (lol) who 'rediscovers' it.

...Then again that also holds true for really stupid ideas and really bad ones, there's always someone stupid enough or evil enough to suggest it again.

Let's hope this is one of the first category.  :p

[Hague]

Right, but weight and volume are completely different. It would have to be some other measure for size for that to work.

What I recommend is making a sorting time for tiles. The more items that are in a tile, the longer the delay between picking the object up and moving it. It works in reverse as well, where putting an item into a pile takes more time. The larger the pile of items on a tile, the less efficient it becomes.

Stockpiles could have a setting to dictate how high each tile in the stockpile gets stacked. There would have to be a maximum limit on how much a stockpile can functionally handle to create quasi-realism. Say if the game's maximum stockpile heap size setting is 10, that means that 10 is the maximum dwarves will willingly dump into a stockpile. However, you can still overload a pile with a dump designation but the delay continues to grow ever higher as you stack more goods in that tile.

Imagine it this way: bins provide an organized area for goods to go. Without any bins, you'll have to lay out valuable goods in an orderly fashion. The more items you have, the more carefully you have to be moving them around and rearranging them to suit your needs. Since stones don't go into bins they just become complicated by their sheer bulk. This justifies the difference in relative sizes of items without complicating the game more with size variables.  

Once stacking is fixed, problems will become simpler when dealing with large piles of coins, ammunition, food, and so on so two 2-stacks of longland grass don't clutter a tile the same as two 5-stacks of the same.

[ May 14, 2008: Message edited by: Hague ]