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[Grimmrog]

Am I the only one having this little "issues" with the trees now being multitiled?

the old trees were just an abstraction of a tree at a location. It was left to imagination if that was a simple orchad tree of 3m size or a giant oak of 20m size. Now the new trees (as amazing as they are) are adding a true size and volume to the "visual" game. This starts being a bit strange as we now have an existing comparison of tile size relative to an object. and knowing that a cave dragon is like 250x a dwarf in volume that would mean a dragon now has to span serveral tiles too (unless its a creature of untold density).
It woul however be very cool if especially large creatures would be multitiled too and it also would fix the now existing tiny supercreatures next to giant trees. 

[Quietust]

It will eventually happen, just not today.

[PatrikLundell]

As Quietust indicated, it's in the development notes and there are thoughts about it (but not final decisions). As an uninformed guess, it would partially build on the future multi tile moving "machinery" framework (to enable boats, reworked wagons, complex multi tile traps, "elevators", etc). Unless the focus gets reshuffled (which happens), or it seems easy enough to cram it in from the side (which it probably isn't), it's unlikely to happen before artifacts, magic, and starting scenarios.

[GhostDwemer]

I've heard it said that multi tile creatures are the bane of any tiled game.

Some discussions of multi tile creatures:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/35v4fo/out_of_curiosity_why_are_multi_tile_creatures_not/
http://forums.roguetemple.com/index.php?topic=618.0

Of course, we already have one multi tile creature: the wagon. So it can be done and I imagine a lot of the code is already there. But multi tiled creatures just get complicated. And in a pure ASCII game, there are display issues, as the second discussion above makes clear. What's this?
DDDD
DDDD
Is it one 2x4 dragon, or 2 2x2 dragons next to each other?

[PatrikLundell]

The wagon is multi tile, and Toady is quite unhappy with it, as far as I understand, so it's going to be ripped out and replaced as part of the boat/machinery rework. It is a messy issue, which is one of the reasons it's not implemented yet. If I remember correctly, Toady's current thinking is that multi tile objects will have 4 facings graphically (N/S/E/W) even though they should be able to move diagonally (as opposed to current wagons).

[FantasticDorf]

Toady has the teeny weeny problem of what is pretty much a biological conservation of mass (exact term slips my mind), as well as properly calculating how to get moving parts across multiple vertical & horizontal z levels all at once without too obstructive collision.

He needs to ensure that the resulting bones and BP structure of the animal in weight and height is properly calculated or negated by strength so that like in the real world, certain creatures have the required bone density/body structure to keep them upright (extra important if he has to calculate the entire creature as 1 entity with all the chunky bits above and below in 1 value of weight). Which for one is why the blue whale exists in water because it eases the stress on the bones rather than the gravity of standing upright on land, to which giraffes have had to specialize REALLY HARD to get the whole tall and long neck thing right with large hearts and numerous blood vessels.

[Melting Sky]

I've heard it said that multi tile creatures are the bane of any tiled game.

Some discussions of multi tile creatures:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/35v4fo/out_of_curiosity_why_are_multi_tile_creatures_not/
http://forums.roguetemple.com/index.php?topic=618.0

Of course, we already have one multi tile creature: the wagon. So it can be done and I imagine a lot of the code is already there. But multi tiled creatures just get complicated. And in a pure ASCII game, there are display issues, as the second discussion above makes clear. What's this?
DDDD
DDDD
Is it one 2x4 dragon, or 2 2x2 dragons next to each other?

Yeah, If and when Toady decides to take this on it will be an absolute coding nightmare. My guess is it will end becoming a complete rewrite of a large portion of the game engine that will span well over a year.

[Kathe]

Maybe it would be best to leave all creatures as 1 tile after all. I was curious about this and posted a question in the FotF thread a couple months ago. But what could be a simpler compromise is if a creature with large mass impeded other creatures from sharing its tile. So a giant sitting square at a door would impede other creatures from transiting. What do you think?

[Killgoth]

Yea, I feel like multi-tiled creatures would just be easy to exploit in fortress mode.  You could cut down on a lot of defense just by making the only entrances to your fort one tile, then forgotten beasts and what not just rage around outside doing nothing but terrorize anything else that wanders onto the map.

[PatrikLundell]

Well, if your thought about defense is to keep the enemies outside by restricting tunnel size there's already an easy solution: just brick up the entrance.
The problem with enemies running around outside and terrorizing anything that enters the map is that they keep you away from the surface resources such as wood, fruit, and herbs, as well as caravans, migrants, and visitors.
Thus, I would want these creatures to try to path to me so I can engage them on my terms, rather than trying to chase it around the surface (in particular since my terms involves using traps rather than risking dorfs. Multi tile creatures would presumably arrive after multi tile devices, such as new interesting complex traps, drawbridges, porticullii, etc).

[mikekchar]

My naive approach would not be to try to shape the multi-tile creatures.  That would essentially be getting you to write a graphics engine with ASCII pixels (which while it would be interesting, it would be hellish).  Instead, I would make all large creatures rectangular.  To show that they were contiguous, I would change the background colour.

The downside to this approach is that you have to completely rethink the way foreground and background colours are rendered.  You would have to reserve some colours for certain things.  But I don't think that would be a bad thing at all.  Right now, there are a lot of sub-optimal colour combinations that you could improve greatly if you sat down and designed it all out from scratch.

Still, depending on the code base, it wouldn't take so long, I think.  Rather than a position for a character, you will need a rectangle.  You will probably also have to change the collision detection to have a bit more logic that would allow dragons to either squeeze around corners... or not.  Possibly  use a fill algorithm to shape the rectangle into confined spaces (maintaining the total number of tiles).   So a bit more special casing of code for those circumstances.  Like I said, it depends a lot on the existing code base.

[Grimmrog]

Yea, I feel like multi-tiled creatures would just be easy to exploit in fortress mode.  You could cut down on a lot of defense just by making the only entrances to your fort one tile, then forgotten beasts and what not just rage around outside doing nothing but terrorize anything else that wanders onto the map.

you cna already dot hat anyways, and i find it hilarious that you cna catch a roc in a single tile cage at the size it actually has. so cagign animals of multitile sizes would also require multitile traps. but currently all you do is trapping them in 1 tile corridors anyways. and you can at any point close any bridge to prevent them from entering. So it would not make stuff more or less complicated than before.

[Dwarf_Fever]

Some old school games I recall would create a double tall giant square, so giant creatures would be displayed as 1x2 squares... but it did not actually "occupy" the square above it in real terms, it was just used to display the extra height and size.

It seems like a decent solution because it at once conveys that this is a much larger creature, but it has no functional impact in terms of needing tile space.