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[mickel]

When you're smoothing walls, wall tiles that are impossible to reach (due to being in a corner) are automatically smoothed when the two adjoining tiles have been smoothed, but the same is not true for detailing.

This leaves these unreachable tiles just smoothed while the rest is detailed, which is perhaps just a minor nuisance, but it looks unesthetical.

[Savok]

I'd say "this annoys me too" except for the fact that I haven't played a non-test fortress with detailed walls.

Cancel the above. It annoys me too because I see detailed walls on DFMA.

I think you could make a workaround with hide.exe and granite.exe. I haven't actually done it, but I think it would be possible. See this page on the wiki for my idea because the forum doesn't have good enough formatting capabilities to do it to my satisfaction.

[mickel]

It's a good workaround. I haven't tested it, but I don't see why it shouldn't work.

I wonder what the solution ought to be. The solution that makes most sense to me is to have the corner tile automatically become engraved, just like they automatically get smoothed.

Either it becomes engraved with the minimal quality possible, or perhaps with the lower of the two neighbor tiles' quality, or the average of the two? Not that big a matter as long as it gets engraved.

[Eagle of Fire]

It would make no sense whatsoever that the corner tile get engraved automatically. What if you dig next to the same corner square but from the other side? The dwarf will strike the rock and a whole pannel will fall down, revealing a detailed wall behind it?

It already doesn't make sense that the corner of the walls or walls between doors or some things get automatically smoothed...

[Savok]

What we want is for it to look engraved until you can see what the tile actually is (by mining to it).

[Xeirxes]

Right... nothing should become engraved by the surrounding tiles, it should obviously only appear engraved. Same goes for smoothing. It's just needed for keeping the rooms easily distinguished to the human eye.

[Savok]

More "it is needed for rooms to look pretty" but yes.

[FaultyLogic]

Perhaps if you engrave both tiles next to a corner some kind of generic tile appear, that fits better with the fully coloured tiles that detailed walls consists of. It doesn't have to have a motive. It shouldn't even.

[Savok]

This thread assumes that engravings are toggled off.

[mickel]

quote:Originally posted by Savok:
<STRONG>This thread assumes that engravings are toggled off.</STRONG>

It does? So if you have engravings toggled on, do the corner tiles get detailed automatically then?

[Savok]

Nope.

There is just less point in having them look detailed.

[mickel]

Well, in game terms there's no point in having them detailed since the room doesn't extend to the corners anyway (the corners being "cut off" in the template) but the tiles for "smooth wall" and "detailed wall" are visually very different from each other, and it looks bad to have spots of smooth wall here and there in an otherwise detailed wall area.

[OldMiner]

Savok is correct in stating that this thread presumes detailed characters are turned off.  This does mean you lose the glory of seeing little 'E's all over your dining hall that you engraved shortly after the elephantine slaughter of aught-five, and the ampersands are completely absent from the treasury built in memorium of Drom 'Pickhead' Holterfeist after his fruitless search for more gold led to other discoveries...

But, even still, detailing has a feature to it that smoothing does not.  Detailing is directional.  So when you detail a wall, only one side of it actually gains value -- the one that faces the engraver while she does her job.  I appreciate the aesthetic considerations here, and the game perhaps should show the corner as engraved until it's dug next to.  But the implication of an engraved 'look' is that the room's value has been increased when that would be impossible.  In the case of a wall such as:

code:

   |..
***+..
...*..
...*..

Presuming asterisks mark walls detailed inside of the bottom left room, automatically detailing the corner here would imply that the right room has an engraving increasing its value, which it doesn't.

Clearly, we just need four dimensional displays for our ASCII to resolve this nuance, and, given those, I'm certain Toady could solve this nigh instantaneously.  I've designated my hammerer that it's her job to hold her breath till this happens.

[mickel]

Since both the detailed and smooth walls are represented by a double-line, it would be pretty simple to have one line pattern represent smooth, and one detailed. Like so:

This is the symbol for a corner of a wall.
+ : Smoothed wall
* : Engraved wall

code:

 
   +++++++
         +
   ***** +
       * +
       * +
       * +

As you can see, the inside corner is engraved, the outside corner is only smoothed.

We'd need four versions of each double-line tile, a simple job.

[ September 03, 2007: Message edited by: mickel ]