Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Zeff]

Hi,

I'd like to suggest something I hope is simply just a matter of turning off pet passable (like with doors) for floor grate or floor bars.

On farms you'll see metal bars are placed on the ground spaced an inch or two apart so that the cattle can't walk across it.  One can have a driveway and leave the gate open with these cattle grates and because they can't get a solid footing with their hooves they won't walk across it.  Perhaps this could only affect creatures with hooved feet though I suspect it'd be simpler to just make it not pet passable.

Wondering if we could have floor grate or floor bars act in the same way.  I'd like to be able to make a cattle pen so my cattle can breed and wander happily but still allow a dwarf in to the area for milking, butchering or what have you.  Currently one can use a door but I find the pets all escape as soon as a dwarf opens the door to enter or leave the pen.

Which brings about the second point..  the animals once I've locked them in a pen all sit at the door with blue question marks popping up over them.  Though this might be more challenging I'm not sure but it'd be cool if the cattle once it figured out it had no path out resigned itself to wandering around wherever it can go.


Thanks for the great game, really enjoying what you've created.

[Vattic]

I made this suggestion before in the Aboveground Diversity thread.

I notice you have fencing suggested, I imagine it looking something like this:
   ┌─┼─┐
   │ c │
   │ cc│
┌──┴───┤
┼    M │
│ M    │
│   M  │
└──────┘

Instead of those being doors they could be stiles, they even look like them in ascii. The animals shouldn't try and path through them reducing the FPS issues. Proper gates might be something else worth considering also.

On the topic of methods to control animals cattle grids might be another method to keep animals in or out or certain areas, to construct them you'd just need to build floor bars over a channelled out tile like:
       M
###===###
###   ###
#########
Certain tags could give/remove a creatures ability to use stiles / cattle grids. When it comes to the fences themselves I could imagine humans being able to climb over them fairly easily but I don't know about dwarves for example.

So yeah I support this idea.

[Silverionmox]

Making better use of existing stuff is always +1. However, it runs into the same pathfinding problems as not pet-passable doors do: the need to maintain several sets of connectivity maps. Maybe the connectivity map ought to be disregarded in case of non-panicked animals in a room declared as an animal pen: they could just pathfind within the room and ignore the rest.