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Author Topic: Rope and Pulley Components  (Read 2262 times)

peglegpengeuin

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Rope and Pulley Components
« on: June 21, 2011, 03:03:45 pm »

I'm sure this has already been suggested before, but here I go anyway:
It would be downright awesome if Dwarf Fortress used some sort of rope and pulley system. I've messed with the idea a bit, and made a sort of faux version of this in MS paint.


Below are two towers connected by a rope, probably made of pig tail. In the center is a bed basket, which a dwarf or adventurer could ride between the towers. Not the most practical method of transportation, but still cool. If the basket is not on a creature's side and it is intelligent enough to know how to use basket travel, it will automatically manipulate the rope to bring the basket closer. And yes, both towers are made of adamantine. I used my old modded version of dwarf fortress to make these buildings fast, and adamantine is one of the most abundant resources there.





I apologize for the massive number of pictures below, but the next possibility occurs over multiple z-levels. This second possible use for ropes is, at least in my opinion, 100 times cooler than the basket idea, though probably a good deal harder to program. The idea is for walls that can be attached to the ends of ropes, and then pulled up and down z-levels. I used this idea to make an adamantine temple, with an entrance controlled by ropes and a lever. When the lever is pulled, the ropes should move their attached walls, making them block or not block the entrance. In the images, the entrance is not blocked. Also, the top image is on the highest z-level, and includes the pulleys that "actually pull" the rope up and down.







I noticed later that on the second rope-wall image I neglected to include the top of the walls I hung on ropes. There should be floor image "+"s on the z-level above the hanging walls, but instead you can see some white dots, representing the rope as it travels down a z-level. These white dots should start appearing one level higher, and stop at the pulley.

While making the above images, I thought of some adventure mode puzzles I could incorporate into the temple, though I decided to keep it simple. Here are some of the ideas I decided not to include:

- Walls can serve as platforms to walk on. The center area on the second floor is empty, though I could build floors there to hide lots of loot. It would only be accessible when the walls are in the bottom-most position, resting on the bottom floor. The temple cannot be entered when the walls are like this, and notice that the lever is outside the temple. There could, perhaps, be a closed floodgate in place of one of the walls on the bottom floor, and a lever inside the temple to open the floodgate. This would create a new entrance/exit, so that one may pull the lever and close off the original entrance without closing one off to the innards of the temple.

- Walls on ropes can be used as elevators. Kind of an obvious one. For some more programming on Toady's part, walls on ropes can be made to hold levers, pressure plates, and other trap thingies. With this, levers can be made to move across z-levels and to different rooms, opening up a world of puzzles where one has to move levers to certain places at certain times.

Creatures and objects should be crushed by walls on ropes as if they were crushed by a bridge, and those creatures not crushable by bridges should not be curshable by walls on ropes. Probably the easiest way to control wall on rope movement is with a loop. If the wall on a rope is set to move down, all lever pulls should move it down, regardless of the lever position, until the wall gets as low as it can. After this, all lever pulls should move the wall up until it gets as high as it can. A bit annoying, but it works.

So, what do you guys think?
EDIT: Added to eternal suggestions list.
« Last Edit: June 22, 2011, 06:35:26 am by peglegpengeuin »
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peglegpengeuin

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Re: Rope and Pulley Components
« Reply #1 on: June 22, 2011, 04:24:45 pm »

Uh... 2 days and 79 views later, and no replies. I'm not sure what to do/think. Does this mean you guys like the idea? Hate it? Like it but would prefer that Toady spent his time on other updates first?

EDIT: This is also a bump... sort of. Also kind of want those who didn't respond on their first views to see there's an unread response and come back. If I stupidly missed a better way to do this or something, then sorry for the double post and my own stupidity.
« Last Edit: June 22, 2011, 04:27:15 pm by peglegpengeuin »
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IT 000

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Re: Rope and Pulley Components
« Reply #2 on: June 22, 2011, 05:37:37 pm »

Honestly it's not you, it's just that a lot of the big debaters and posters have suddenly and spontaneously been kidnapped by child snatchers. The problem is that only those select people would bother to read such an indepth post as you have provided.

A good rule is
Length of Post = Less Relevant and Useful Posts
It's just human nature.

Personally, I am quite surprised, most people just tend to put this into a stub saying less words then I did in my opening sentence. While you have obviously done your research and put a large amount of time into this.

Overall I feel that it is a nice touch. I have always uses Portcullises to mimic gates. Additionally I have long yearned for puzzle fortresses. Coding seems like a real problem for the baskets. You would have to make the dwarf interrupt his current job, and be smart enough to say to himself "Okay the workshop is across this river, and there's a basket" unless you make the player go [ 'Add Item' -> Select from a list of EVERY item in your fortress -> wait for dwarf -> send -> designate job ], but even then, having the dwarf just walk there would be more efficient then making a hundred clicks. Having a drawbridge and a lever over a river would be far more effective then manually basketting things across. Additionally it would fall to the old DF physics where a elephant corpse could be basketted twenty tiles without the basket sagging.

As far as the walls go, I fear that they would fall under the old floodgate treatment. They have no significant advantage over building a bridge. A bridge would probably require less resources per space as well. Additionally bridges don't need to be physically attached.

Furthermore elevators pre 1400's (relative cuttoff list for technology) were simple pully mechanisms used to move supplies up and down, to put a human on there would have taken three other humans to pull him up. This is usually what the elevator arguments come down to.
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astaldaran

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Re: Rope and Pulley Components
« Reply #3 on: June 23, 2011, 07:45:05 am »

I like the idea, especially if you can designate whole structures to be connected to the rope. So say you are building a tower of adamantine on the top of a great mountain..maybe you can actually build it at ground level or deep underground and then hull the whole thing up. This could make for all kinds of interesting fortress ideas (though dwarves are pretty fast so it is hard to imagine this actually being more efficient with time, but a fun idea). This would replicate the way the Pyramids were probably constructed (well, except they were doing GIANT blocks and no structures).

However, given all that..it probably would be hard to both program and use...I would rather see Toady implement things like the ability to build ships and such..that would be useful and once he does that it would be far easier to do this idea since the pieces would already be in place to make structures into a single unit that can be moved around.
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Waparius

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Re: Rope and Pulley Components
« Reply #4 on: June 23, 2011, 07:01:29 pm »

While I love love love the idea of ropes, ziplines, elevators and cranes, they'd be best brought in after a revamp of item hauling. When minecarts become useful it should also become difficult to, say, haul a bed down fifty spiral stairs. Or fifty everywhere-squares without a cart.

(Also cranes and ladders should be reusable building components that let you put a roof/multiple levels onto something without building and unbuilding steps, but that's neither here nor there.)
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tHe_silent_H

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Re: Rope and Pulley Components
« Reply #5 on: June 23, 2011, 08:15:30 pm »

should this go in, imma mod in a piano, then find a way to drop it on nobles
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astaldaran

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Re: Rope and Pulley Components
« Reply #6 on: June 24, 2011, 09:24:38 am »

should this go in, imma mod in a piano, then find a way to drop it on nobles

If it goes in, just build a piano that is HUGE out of gold and drop it on their heads..no need to mod...(though ofcourse the piano won't "work")
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