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[Shoku]

Yeah, if you build a repeater system you've usually got to turn it off in a way that will make it a bit difficult to restart.
If you had a nice pump acting as one wall of the water area and a floodgate over a hole to make another wall you could probably set up a decent storage room below it to drain the thing into but also get most of the water back in on command.

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With some math and good planning you could create a system that would automatically pup water from something like a river and pump enough water onto some hatches or whatnot to drop into these filling them to the right level.

[Xenos]

Yeah, if you build a repeater system you've usually got to turn it off in a way that will make it a bit difficult to restart.
If you had a nice pump acting as one wall of the water area and a floodgate over a hole to make another wall you could probably set up a decent storage room below it to drain the thing into but also get most of the water back in on command.

build a vertical shaft deep enough to hold all the water.  then have a pump stack to bring it back up, ending with the last pump hitting into the room like you specified.  this would let more water be pumped back into the room.

[Interus]

I wonder if there's a way to make it fill up to exactly the level you want if it's bellow that level, automatically.  If that were the case, then I'm not sure it would matter if water disappeared unless mechanisms deconstruct too, in which case I don't see it mattering anyway for adventure mode.

As for shutting it down, I don't see why you'd need to pull a lever.  If you started it by taking a bucket of water out and dumping it somewhere, then you could shut it off by simply dumping a bucket of water in right?

[jei]

I think that the one time I tried out the flow setting, the only water in view had open space above it. I guess the depth doesn't display in tiles with open space above.

This layout 'fooled' the movement of the 6/7 depth into mostly staying away from the pressure plate, which is in the far left side of the flooded area, adjacent to a very hard to see floodgate.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The '6' (for lack of a better term) generally bounced around in the large area and once in awhile trigger the plate, occasionally hovering nearby for 5-10 seconds. There were periods upwards of thirty seconds when the plate wasn't triggered. That's good enough for my needs.

In a series of 6x1 and 10x1 corridors with one 6/7 tile, everything triggered just fine (rapidly), bridges and spike traps a little less due to their delays. A 6x1 corridor seems to be the sweet spot for anything you want triggered rapidly.

Makes me wonder if you had made a ring out of it, would it rotate clockwise or anticlockwise and would it provide for a more steady and regular signal.

[eggrock]

This idea is genius! But I'm a complete and total noob, so I have a couple of questions:

1) How do you get exactly 1/7 of water out of your system? Just making it a water source with a pond job somewhere and then removing the zone once 1/7 has gone?
2) Is there an easy way to turn it off? I've not used pressure plates before, so can you link a lever to them to say "stop working for a bit", or do you have to just dump out the water and start over?

...which is a great mental picture, actually. "Urist, there's a dead kitten stuck in the danger room again! Hit the dump valve!"

1) Yep, I made it a water source and then removed both zones once a bucket was scooped. I found that if I left the pond zone active a dorf would still take a bucket from my timer from time to time (or from the nearby river).

An easy way to start and/or stop a timer is to use one or more floodgates to destroy water, or a single raising bridge of the correct length if water can be atomsmashed. If you only use one pressure plate in an area I'd say a door linked to a lever would be the easiest way to stop/start. I don't think a door destroys water when it opens or closes and that would eliminate the need to drain/fill, which in turn would allow you to completely isolate the timer from everything else.

One thing to note with large, complex areas is that it can take awhile to flood them to 7/7. When I flooded the diamond shaped area from my previous post, everything flooded nicely up to 6/7 but a group of 6's bounced around in the diamond for well over a minute until they finally left.

[edit] The wiki says "Doors also halt the movement of liquids in the manner of floodgates" so they probably destroy liquid.

[eggrock]

This works as an easy on, easy off version. The timer can be primed, started and stopped from a single lever and the only external requirement is water if the timer gets reset.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The bridge and both floodgates in the Z-1 tunnel (with the pressure plate) are linked to the on/off switch. The 'safety cutoff' floodgate is optional depending on how OCD you are with accident prevention fun.

If my math is correct this layout can be used with these specific widths and number of floodgates:

Code: [Select]

w = tunnel width or area (not counting floodgates)
fg = number of floodgates necessary
p = pressure plate setting

w:   4 fg:  2 p: 5 (shown in the image above)
w:   6 fg:  2 p: 7
w:  10 fg:  3 p: 5
w:  12 fg:  3 p: 7
w:   6 fg:  4 p: 4
w:   7 fg:  4 p: 6
w:  16 fg:  4 p: 5
w:  18 fg:  4 p: 7


I also accidentally made a sort of metronome that cycled very regularly, ~215 steps open, ~160 closed. I'm positive that it's on the wiki somewhere but when I saw the design I was too noobish to understand wtf. My layout went something like this:

FBBPX

F - Fortification
B - 2x1 bridge (I think it can open either way)
P - Pressure plate (7/7)
X - Floodgate

Or something like that, I saved the design off but didn't pay a lot of attention at the time.

Actually, I took the time to look for it and it's under 'repeater' in the 40d section of the wiki. This is a much safer version:

Code: [Select]

≈≈≈≈≈ - river or brook
═╗≈╔═ - wall to channel out after construction
 ╠╬╣  - fortification (to filter out any creatures inhabiting your river)
 ╠F╣  - shutoff floodgate (linked to exterior lever)
 ║#║  - 1-tile drawbridge (linked to pressure plate)
 ║p┼  - pressure plate (set to 7-7 water), and access door
 ╠F╣  - floodgate (linked to pressure plate)
 ╚═╝

My 1x1 drawbridges don't seem like they open/close which is why I've been using 2x1 bridges.

[forumist]

Do you know about the init option that changes the blue water tiles to blue numbers 1 through 7?

I've seen this on screenshots, and I was wondering how to obtain this. What option in what file ? I haven't found in data/init/init.txt

[Shoku]

I wonder if there's a way to make it fill up to exactly the level you want if it's bellow that level, automatically.  If that were the case, then I'm not sure it would matter if water disappeared unless mechanisms deconstruct too, in which case I don't see it mattering anyway for adventure mode.

As for shutting it down, I don't see why you'd need to pull a lever.  If you started it by taking a bucket of water out and dumping it somewhere, then you could shut it off by simply dumping a bucket of water in right?

If you lined the whole space with pumps to suck all the water out of it then you could have another plate set to go off in shallow water that would empty any tiles in there. You'd need some other system to turn the pumps off but meanwhile you could have some overhead bridge being covered in water from another set of pumps. With the overhead amount calculated to fill the thing just right and then drop in the volume of water you wanted. For non-multiples of 7 you'd have to work out some larger number, have a floodgate to allow the water to spread out, and then close the floodgate to make your compact system. You'd need another path with a water dropping bridge that was 7 - #of tiles you wanted sliding around to then raid the last bit of water down (because they might all get stuck on the wrong side of the floodgate if you did it in the first water fill.

Do you know about the init option that changes the blue water tiles to blue numbers 1 through 7?

I've seen this on screenshots, and I was wondering how to obtain this. What option in what file ? I haven't found in data/init/init.txt

It's in d_init as SHOW_FLOW_AMOUNTS

[forumist]

Do you know about the init option that changes the blue water tiles to blue numbers 1 through 7?

I've seen this on screenshots, and I was wondering how to obtain this. What option in what file ? I haven't found in data/init/init.txt

It's in d_init as SHOW_FLOW_AMOUNTS

Thanks! Looking at this file, I also understood what was this "toggle engravings" thing. I usually avoided engraving floors, because this made the things pretty confused, but now I know how to obtain something cleaner, I will less hesitate giving my dwarfs some fine art to look at when they look down.