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[Chthonic]

Under what circumstances do you envision minecarts behaving according to minecart physics?

I.e., are they going to break free from time to time?  What would cause that?  How often are they going to go careening off out of control?

[Farmerbob]

Under what circumstances do you envision minecarts behaving according to minecart physics?

I.e., are they going to break free from time to time?  What would cause that?  How often are they going to go careening off out of control?

This just in:

"04/05/2012  I went ahead and just debug-put a cart on a track and debug-pushed it. They gain speed going down ramps, get slower going up, lose a little speed on the rest of the track, a bit more on corners, and they fly in little parabolas and crash into the ground when you set them free, either straight off a cliff or launched from a short upward ramp. I've put off updating the rest of the projectiles to have parabolic paths because I don't want to lose time dealing with adv mode targeting etc., but you may well see parabolic unit paths when creatures are unfortunate enough to take flight without wings."

I cannot wait to see what Toady ends up with af final product and what modding is available on these carts, and what people do with them!

[bombzero]

so umm... enemies flying in parabolic paths after being hit......... all hail Toady! master of minor feature bloat!

[Chthonic]

This just in:

That's what I was responding to . . . how often are dwarves going to creep up and give your mine carts a push?  Or is it if the beast pulling the cart gets shot and killed?  Or do gremlins and poltergeists get involved?  Will there be a (P)ush the minecart command?  Will the traces occasionally break, causing your carts to go on a bloodthirsty rampage through your miners?

The questions just pile up!

[Mr Frog]

The Big Thing for me right now:

Can minecarts injure creatures that happen to be standing in the way while they are moving and, if so, does the mass of the cart and its contents impact the damage caused? Does the AI try to stay out of the way of moving carts?

[Greiger]

New HFS defense.  Minecarts full of lead bars travelling down a 200 z-level ramp to the circus.

Do minecarts currently, or are they planned to have a maximum velocity?   Just a point where no matter how many more ramps you put in front of it, it's just not going to go any faster?  Or is the plan to just use map height limitations or a max 1 tile per tick rule to keep warp speed minecarts from hitting things?

Also in the hitting things vein,  Will minecarts striking folks use the system that ballistas use where they just pick a random number of body parts to wreck when they hit something, or is there another plan in the works?

[MrWiggles]

The Big Thing for me right now:

Can minecarts injure creatures that happen to be standing in the way while they are moving and, if so, does the mass of the cart and its contents impact the damage caused? Does the AI try to stay out of the way of moving carts?

I'm gonna go with yes, on all accounts here. Except the last one.

[Mr Frog]

The Big Thing for me right now:

Can minecarts injure creatures that happen to be standing in the way while they are moving and, if so, does the mass of the cart and its contents impact the damage caused? Does the AI try to stay out of the way of moving carts?

I'm gonna go with yes, on all accounts here. Except the last one.

Welp, looks like danger rooms just became 100% dwarfier.

[Willfor]

This just in: Imma make some rollercoasters in the new version. :Db

[ArkDelgato]

Will the parabolic arcs affect catapults before other projectiles or will those all be done together?

[Torchy]

New HFS defense.  Minecarts full of lead bars travelling down a 200 z-level ramp to the circus.

I thought of something like this, but a little different (and less reliant on the unknown matter of acceleration being capped or not):

Minecart-based DIY catapults. Say a goblin siege comes to your fort and is waiting outside your sealed-up front entrance. You have a fairly respectable tower built up above the main hall.

Code: [Select]


tower
 _______
|       |
|       |
|       |
|       |
|       |
|       |
|       |________
|                X_/
|                 |
|                     <- main entrance               
|________________                                g  goblins g  g  g


The X_/ is a ledge inaccessible from the ground with an open port leading into the tower, and an upward ramp on the end. This portway is connected to a long straight series of ramps in the (necessarily broad) tower, at the top of which is a stockpile of minecarts and lead bars.
When a siege comes,  and stands waiting outside the fortress main gate loitering, the dwarves are sent up to load a minecart full of lead bars, and push it down the ramp. The cart full of lead bars rockets down the giant tower-ramp until it reaches appreciable speed, then shoots out the port above the entrance hall and sails off the ramp. It flies a distance that I'm hoping will be fairly predictable (and therefore, reproducible) based on the load of the cart and the height of the tower from which it's dropped, and then crashes down into the middle of the goblins, smashing at least one and hopefully several of them to pieces. The dwarves in the tower continue loading lead-filled missiles with impunity until every goblin in range is a chunky splatter.

Depending on how tracks work out - Can you have interconnected track lines, that is to say, a system where a track could have "tributaries" that lead into it and join into the main line? Such that you could have, for example, three starting branches in a line converging into a single ending segment? - you might even be able to have multiple launching stations at varying heights up the tower feeding into the same main ramp, so that you could order the carts deployed from different ones to hit different distances away from the tower. (Depending on if the load of the cart affects the gain in speed, and how much, you could vary your shooting distance this way as well).

[MrWiggles]

Will the parabolic arcs affect catapults before other projectiles or will those all be done together?

As stated in the same dev post, nope.

[Cruxador]

It would waste a lot of power on friction, and it would take a single huge screw which would be difficult to manufacture and which would break down a lot. It also wouldn't be able to handle turns.

Nah you simply design the system to make unpowered turns, and use lots of small screws with gearboxes here and there.

You can just line up screws one after another, no different from pump stacks.  And unpowered turns could be facilitated by driving it up a ramp, and then letting it go back down a ramp to build a little momentum to get it by to the next chain of screws.  (The same goes for the wheels.)

(snip)

Nah you simply design the system to make unpowered turns, and use lots of small screws with gearboxes here and there.

No more complex than what our dwarves already build for water/magma pumps really.

Of course wooden poles transferring thousands of horsepower across hundreds if not thousands of feet is pretty unrealistic.

There are a lot of things in DF that are modeled impressively.  Power generation and transfer is not one of those things (yet?) so I don't see why future tech stuff would need to be any more realistic than past stuff.

Yeah, that's true. Pump stacks are pretty unrealistic too. I guess the realistic way to do it in-game would be to just make each mechanical component subject to a break chance based on the amount of power involved and the piece material. Presumably that'll happen when wear and tear on buildings happens in general.

[caknuck]

Only in Dwarf Fortress does "WE WNAT WHEELBARROW" lead to single-variable calculus.

I'm going to load mine carts full of coal, roll them downhill through a magma mister, then make my dwarfs push them around the fort in some demented Olympic torch relay.

[greenskye]

Minecarts are the best thing ever. So excited for this change!