Print

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

[PsyberianHusky]

I think that realistic better cave ins should be coupled with sieges, that way you could have your bizarre, fun, fantasy structures and ivory pillars and well engineered towers and great halls. The a goblin siege and a troll can come in and start haphazardly throwing boulders and then take out the load stone to your entire fortress killing 18 dwarves and knocking another 5 unconscious. and you are left with a section of the fort that noone can safely travel in anymore because it isn't solid enough and all sorts of fun things start living in it. -or- you can send skilled engineers to attempt to reinforce the area enough that it can be rebuilt.

[Sowelu]

Firstly, about the lag issue, well, cave-ins don't necessarily happen right when you dig a cave, they might happen weeks or months later.

NOOOOOOOOoooooooo

I'm going to dodge technical explanations for why I think this would not cause lag.  Because I have good reasons to think it wouldn't, but whatever.

Something important like this MUST happen DIRECTLY in response to player actions, or the learning curve becomes impossible.  "Okay, I'm digging, I'm digging, things are holding up, life is great, okay, let's move some furniture in, start some farming, fight some goblins and...It collapsed?  But I haven't touched it in a while!"  Collapses should IMO be in direct and immediate response to player actions at all times, with no waiting.

(Besides, if you skip any worthwhile tests at all and put them off until later, you'll end up with horrific abuses of physics that shouldn't ever last, that still last however many weeks until you test it.)

[o_O[WTFace]]

Feedback does not neccesarily have to = collapse.  A support thats 1r over its load limit could get cracks in it, or something, bits of sand and gravel could fall from the ceiling and maybe even a year or two later the thing just gives out and boom, dwarf sandwich. It could provide a use for the architecture labor too, somehow...

[Thief^]

Can we have a poll? I vote in favour of more realistic cave-ins. Specifically I think soil tiles should collapse if a room is larger than 5x5 (the biggest buildings), and rock should allow larger (10x10?).

[Kogan Loloklam]

Can we have a poll? I vote in favour of more realistic cave-ins. Specifically I think soil tiles should collapse if a room is larger than 5x5 (the biggest buildings), and rock should allow larger (10x10?).

There is already a poll. It's called the eternal suggestions.
Realistic Mining Suggestion (#14 with 170 votes--Topic) and Bring Back Cave-ins (#116 with 4 votes) are what you are looking for. Ranks taken at 4/22/2010 @ 9:35 AM MST. You want to show support for them? vote for them.

Dwarf Talk #8 explains why they aren't in, and probably won't ever be. Figuring out how to display to players in such a manner that it is user friendly is the way to get them in. I believe players will figure it out via trial and error, but then again I believe a understanding of structure is intuitive to humans.

[effigyoffaith]

I think it would be fun with a system like bloodbeard suggested, with random checks to see if it falls down. It would be fun to have dwarf with an engineering job turned on going around inspecting your walls and designations and warning of possible problems.

[General Pattern]

@Retro - As a materials scientist-in-training, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the problem people have with the current system is material strength. Right now, all materials act with infinite compression, tensile, & shear strength - they still require support, so gravity is still in play, but it is impossible for them to collapse, shear, or simply even break(with the atom smasher exception).
If Toady adds material strength to the raws when/if the realistic system comes into play, than a solution for players who prefer the old system is simply to change them. So you could simply set the strength of all materials to be enormously large, which could come in the form of a simple mod. Or vanilla DF could have enormous material strength, and modded DF can have realistic material strength. I'm not sure which one is preferable.

Going on about realistic material strength, I think we have to realize that it can only come after multi-tiled creatures, since I remember Toady saying that with them comes the finite tile size. We could still have a new system and material strength, but it would be impossible to apply realistic values without knowing how much limestone is in that tile holding up the tower.

The addition of an architecture view, as several people have talked about, should allow most players to get into the statics without a formal education. We just need enough mods to see in 3d, as well as maybe a side view within DF itself. I personally prefer the color options over the numerical one.

Something Toady might add on to make it easier for new players might be preplanned support structures - I.E. flying buttresses, arches, columns, etc... already designed that simply have to be placed and built. This would give players unfamiliar with architecture methods to still be able to support their constructions. Toady could even follow the 1400's(1500's? I forgot) rule.

[SmileyMan]

Sorry to necro the thread a bit, but there's no point in going over each point again.  It's just the following occurred to me when I woke up this morning*

Toady's reasoning for not including realistic cave-ins is more about communicating it to the player than actually implementing it.

What about a system where, before a mining/channelling/deconstruction operation, a check was made to see if the subsequent layout would be unstable?  Then you could just use a "Digging cancelled: unstable structure" message similar to the existing damp/warm stone ones?  Players could then place a suitable support and redesignate the dig, or they could redesignate it anyway and suffer the consequences (as with damp/warm stone now)

This could perhaps then represent the dwarves' innate sense of architecture and structure, and wouldn't require the player to have a degree in civil engineering to create a safe fortress, but still allow those who want to create the Kölner Dom of the DF world to fill their boots.

Also, a player could designate a large area to be mined out, and the check/undesignate procedure could in theory create a series of supporting columns naturally, although perhaps they might not be in a nice pattern.  You could then leave it as is for that natural look, or where you don't care (mass-mining a sedimentary layer), or place more aesthetically pleasing pillars and then deconstruct the automatic ones.

* Note: if you wake up in the morning thinking about Dwarf Fortress, you probably need to play it less...

[Shrugging Khan]

I'm always for more realism. Realism AND some well-integrated magic is fine, too.

But really, the approximation of greater and greater realism in detail and in general is one of the things that make DF great.
Also, Realism is what makes me feel good about success in a game. Call it escapism! 

[Quatch]

I think we have, in this thread, several potential ways to show and tell a player about realistic cave-ins. It would be awesome to get toady to respond, to see if these are approaching suitable.

Also, the designation cancelled: unstable formation, sounds good to me.

[Shrugging Khan]

Arguing that a realistic feature shouldn't be implemented because of another unrealistic one is like saying "progress is undesirable, we have conservatives".

[SmileyMan]

Which part of a dwarf tapping into a magma gusher are you objecting to?  Surely any dwarven miner's ultimate way to buy the farm!