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[Dunamisdeos]

So, I think it would be nice to have a block that works like a floor but prevents movement in ONE direction, such as south or east. This could function as a "railing" without occupying the entire tile.

Could make it much easier to build things like multi-z ramps or pathways. It might even help with building places for say, an archer to stand and walk.

Wat do you guys think?

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

...use fortifications?

[Dunamisdeos]

Those take up an extra tile. This would function as a floor. The benefit would be a one-tile wide walkway rather than two or three.

[Putnam]

Toady's described non-all-way tiles as something akin to hellish for pathfinding before.

[Splint]

Wouldn't vertical bars also be able to more or less fill the role? Hell, you can even lower them if you need to improve traffic flow some. Not perfect of course, but that's what I sometimes use them for.

[Putnam]

i think what's meant is "like a floor tile, but blocks pathing in a certain direction".

[Orange Wizard]

Vertical bars are fine in terms of flavour, I think. If the pathing is particularly awkward then there's not really any point.

[Reelya]

Toady's described non-all-way tiles as something akin to hellish for pathfinding before.

Yeah, it would be absolute hell on FPS. Because pathfinding works by adding up costs through a sequence of tiles. If there were some tiles where you could only move in certain directions, then the pathfinding would need to check each tile to see if it's one of those "railing" tiles, the exclude certain directions from consideration. That means an extra level of checking on every tile of the map: even if the player never uses any railings, there would be an additional "is this a railing?" check on every tile of every path-finding process.

Walls and empty air currently serve as barriers. These use the same system: they are "non-walkable" spaces, so the path-finder rejects them as possible locations, and it can do so blind: it doesn't care why they are unwalkable, they're all excluded from the search path.

Railings also serve no gameplay purpose. On the other side of the railing is empty space. You can't path into empty space, so it serves as the same type of barrier to pathing as a wall would. And it's not like we need to "save space", because it's a tile-based game. Just build bigger things if the walls are too thick for you.