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[brucemo]

I don't see the point to hallways in the first place. A hall implies long horizontal travel distance, which I doubt is good.

Why not, for example, just a 20 x 20 x 8 (z) box with stairs in the middle?

[Hyndis]

The absolute most efficient fortress design is a cube made entirely out of up/down stairs, with little platforms for workshops.

This is also a very boring and ugly looking fortress.

I prefer grand, multi level halls with wide corridors and big rooms, with natural stone pillars left in the room. Everything smoothed of course.

Hallways 4 tiles wide seem to be ideal for major pathways. This lets me install double wide doors at intersections where it narrows down a little bit, then widens again.

[krenshala]

By only giving a single from point A to point B, regardless of what those points are, you minimize the number of possible paths (tiles) that need to be checked.  Having a large cube of stairs, however, means it has to check all possible options for every pathing check, which would put a big hit on your FPS rates.  Even multiple smaller stairs (say 5 or 9 in a box pattern) give a significant performance loss.

What I do is make a three wide hallway, with a high-traffic zone down the middle.  What I see watching the traffic is that when dwarves collide the faster dwarf moves out of the way of the slower dwarf, regardless of their relative direction of travel (e.g., even when both going the same direction).  Things just run smoother for me this way compared to how it worked when I used one-wide hallways.  I'm not really sure how much, if any, difference it made on my FPS; I didn't see any difference.

[Jingles]

Things just run smoother for me this way compared to how it worked when I used one-wide hallways.  I'm not really sure how much, if any, difference it made on my FPS; I didn't see any difference.

For sure they do, but I don't know about you but when I was still using one tile wide hallways it was only a single hallway from point to another.  I havent yet had an oportunity to test what would happen with more.

I think I got to make a highway fortress again....  For testing purposes...

[Nil Eyeglazed]

By only giving a single from point A to point B, regardless of what those points are, you minimize the number of possible paths (tiles) that need to be checked.  Having a large cube of stairs, however, means it has to check all possible options for every pathing check.

That's not the case.  With a big box of stairs, you may have to evaluate every tile adjacent to a tile on the ideal route, but no other tiles.  The direct path will always be evaluated completely before evaluating any other paths, because the pathing cost of every tile in the ideal route is the same-- the estimated distance to goal is equal to the actual distance to goal.  That's why a* works well.

However, a direct hallway would work at least as well.  The problem is that most hallway systems aren't fully direct.

[Iapetus]

My prefered layout is an 11x11 block pattern interspersed by 3-wide corridors, like this:

Code: [Select]

#D+D#############D#D#
D+++D+++++++++++D+++D
#+++#+++++++++++#+++#
D+++D+++++++++++D+++D
#D#D#############D#D#
#+++#############+++#
#+++#############+++#
#+++#############+++#
#+++#############+++#
#+++#############+++#
#+++#############+++#
#+++#############+++#
#+++#############+++#
#+++#############+++#
#+++#############+++#
#+++#############+++#
#D+D#############D#D#
D+++D+++++++++++D+++D
#+++#+++++++++++#+++#
D+++D+++++++++++D+++D
#D#D#############D#D#
It might not be the most FPS-efficient layout (and not probably not the most space-efficient either - I'm currently experimenting with a new version using 2-wide coridoors) but I find it good because
a) It's easy to draw out
b) the central block can easily be divided up or hollowed out into regularly sized rooms (9 3x3, 4 5x5, or 16 2x2) for workshops or bedrooms
c) If you need to set up a temporary or emergancy workshop, you can stick one in a coridoor
d) It's easy to seal off areas in case of flood/intruders/miasma etc

[Hyndis]

I dig out huge areas of up/down stairs when digging out massive artificial caverns. I get no FPS hit at all when the up/down stairs just exist and sit there. My FPS plummets when I'm tearing down the up/down stairs by channeling them out one Z level at a time, but if I'm not digging them out my FPS is perfectly fine.

You could make a cube, with the center part being stockpiles, and workshops around the outside of the cube. While a borg cube of up/down stairs would be very efficient, and remember you can put stockpiles on stairs and the stockpile works just fine, its probably the least attractive kind of fortress ever.