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[Ez]

Not sure if this has been discussed before, I haven't found any topics about it. So anyway:

Dorfs get scared every time they see a hostile creature, unfortunately this also means they get scared even if said hostile creature can't possibly harm them due to being on the other side of a chasm (non-flying) or a river (living, non-swimmer).

Would it be possible to make the dorfs only get scared by creatures that have a clear path to them? It's really annoying to be unable to build a bridge over a chasm only because the workers are afraid of trolls 12 levels below them with no possible way up.

[Foehamster]

Currently the workaround is to station marksdwarves. I don't mind dwarves being a bit skittish, but there should be more limits than just line-of-sight.

[culwin]

I think it would be tough to program automatically.
I mean, imagine a colossus on the the other side of a wall where it CAN get to the dwarf.
It might not get him immediately (because it's busy smashing a goat or whatever), but it can and will eventually.
There would be a lot of pathfinding calculations.
An easier solution would be the ability to set a "prisoner" label on a creature, or maybe a "no fear" label, which would cause your dwarfs to not be afraid of it (and maybe not attack it either).
Then it would be the player's responsibility for the dwarfs not being scared of the creature.
Great for keeping prisoners in pits in your fortress.

[Ez]

Or maybe it would just be easier to make it so only the dorf that's currently targeted by the hostile creature will run away.

[Vester]

But then the others will be just standing around while the other one runs for his bearded life!

[Ez]

Hm, thinking about it now I guess that using military dorfs to dispose of the threat is probably much more fun than making dorfs fearless.

It doesn't fix the problem with pitted hostile creatures though. I want my pit of thousand gobos, damnit!

[SlipshodDorf]

But then the others will be just standing around while the other one runs for his bearded life!

Or Urist will run out to grab that pig tail sock next to the collosus because he isn't the 'current' target, and once it kills that target, Urist is standing next to him to be crushed to death

[Virex]

Isn't that what's supposed to happen anyway?


I guess you could make it so that creatures that have been caught don't cause fear unless they actively attack someone. That would at least fix the pit issue.

[Zangi]

Basically, how Evil Genius does it, but the opposite.
In Evil Genius, you have to tag specific people for mind-numbing, capture or death.

In DF, it would be nice to tag specific creatures as don't fear, don't kill, or whatever.  Even something along the lines of disarm, capture and provide minimal doctoring to prevent death if knocked out instead of finishing off.

[Wyrm]

A connection map that is updated live ought to make such a calculation a piece of cake — well, the program would have an easier time of it. A connection map would tell you rather promptly whether a navigatible path exists between two points without having to go through pathfinding. Pathfinding, you see, emits a specific solution — it returns a path that can be followed to get from A to B, but that's not what's needed in this case. All we want is to know if there is a way to get from A to B, but we don't care what that way is. This is comparatively easier to accomplish if we have a connection map.

We already know that Toady maintains a primitive version of this. My version is one of a grander vision. This connection map keeps track of connection by movement type, and keeps track of mutable connections, such as doors and bridges, and updates continuously when they are opened and closed. With such a map, a program can quickly tell whether one spot is accessible to another: the program will know that it is able to move from one accessible region to another using various means of travel, without knowing the exact path across it.

As an analogy, we know we can get to California from Washington state by way of Oregon just by knowing that Oregon shares a border with both. I could not tell tell you the shortest path, but that is irrelevant to the problem at hand.

[darkflagrance]

As a corollary to this, what about creatures getting upset due to environmental circumstances. For example, elves might be scared of narrow, enclosed spaces, or humans might be afraid of the dark. Cats might cancel hunting near water, or dwarves might cancel jobs upon sight of the sunlit air for their own reasons (as part of cave adaptation).