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[G-Flex]

Oh. Right. Reading it in context, that makes more sense.

[thvaz]

Also, I received my crayon donation reward last week (Dwarf riding a war-giant-armadillo!!). It came with a pin. Anyone else get one?

I got one too. It looks like a surprise, as Toady never promised them.

About the carts...it looks like it is almost finished.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Being able to haul multiple small objects
Having multiple dwarves involved with item hauling for a job
Being able to move multiple objects with roughly the same destination at once
Wheelbarrows to haul more objects than can be carried
Minecarts
-Wooden, stone-carved and metal tracks
-Can be filled like stockpiles and moved between destinations
Work animals to tow carts and haul objects
 -Feeding stations for burden animals (my inclusion, but Toady said he will have to have it done)
 -hay, etc (same above)

Related to the hauling improvements, there is still the mining rewrite...we don't have plans for them.

[Rafal99]

As a dedicated follower of DF, all I can think is "what the fuck?"  I know Toady can really tear through new features sometimes, but he's been working on mine carts for four days and he's already got physics and collisions and stuff.

Inspiration and motivation often come in bursts.  Like other kinds of drugs, though, they tend to be followed by a crash.  Often, you get a few days or a week or two of furious activity followed by a couple weeks of "ugh... I don't even wanna get out of bed."

At least, that's how it works for the other artistic types and coders I know.

So most artists have bipolar disorder... ?


As for Toady, yeah he surprised us. But I think that he spent lots of time drawing plans, thinking about algorithms, maybe even prepared some code etc. during the recent bugfixing time, so he had already most of stuff prepared now when he started actually coding the minecarts. So he probably spent much more time than those 4 days.

By the way I see begining of an era of minecart logic computing!

[Urist McDepravity]

By the way I see begining of an era of minecart logic computing!

I think, more important that it could become another universal solution to all problems instead of magma with proper usage of these accelerating rollers and high accelerating towers. Zombies? Use railgun! FBs? Railgun!

Oh, that actually made me wonder.
Is there any limit to the speed of minecart? Will it reach speed of light after going through synchrotron or very, very tall acceleration tower?

[Gauteamus]

I am obviously very exited about minecarts, but got abit worried when I read the devlog post on rollers.
How will those work? Where will they get their energy from? If they have to be connected to some power source, be it animal/dwarf powered pumps, wind/water mills, steam engines or whatever, I am more than happy to handwave the engineering problems inside the roller black box.  I am probably worrying needlessly, though, I doubt toady would add a source of energy just out of the blue.


EDIT: Major reading comprehension fail on my part, both in skimming the last couple of pages of this thread, not noticing the other posts on the exact same topic[!]. and in failing to read the powered part of "powered rollers placed in strips".
I'll leave the post as a mark of shame. Ungreened the questions.

[thvaz]

EDIT: Major reading comprehension fail on my part, both in skimming the last couple of pages of this thread, not noticing the other posts on the exact same topic[!]. and in failing to read the powered part of "powered rollers placed in strips".
I'll leave the post as a mark of shame.

Ungreen your question as it is already answered to easy Toady's work while searching for valid ones.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Question: How do adventurers interact with minecarts? Can they push them? Can they ride, or at least climb on top of, them? Do minecarts provide cover? Etc?

[Willfor]

So most artists have bipolar disorder... ?

It's a fairly common condition that artists face. I've seen these tendencies in myself, and in several artists I know -- in cases professionally diagnosed with it, and not.

Unfortunately, there is also a long and sordid history of artists self-medicating, and throwing their bodies and minds into destructive tailspin. I'm quite thankful that Toady has not gone this route.

[Karlito]

About slaves, maybe some civs could make use of them?

Unlikely that it is high priority (see The Magnificent Mermaid Farming Nerf).

What was this? (don't smite me, Footkerchief )

At one point merpeople had bones that were ridiculously valuable. So naturally, players started to build forts to capture, breed, and kill them, collecting their bones and selling them to caravans. Then, at some point in the future, merpeople were changed to have ordinary bones. There's a thread somewhere that documents all this.

[blue sam3]

About slaves, maybe some civs could make use of them?

Unlikely that it is high priority (see The Magnificent Mermaid Farming Nerf).

What was this? (don't smite me, Footkerchief )

At one point merpeople had bones that were ridiculously valuable. So naturally, players started to build forts to capture, breed, and kill them, collecting their bones and selling them to caravans. Then, at some point in the future, merpeople were changed to have ordinary bones. There's a thread somewhere that documents all this.

And then somebody went and started doing it with sea monsters instead.

[dreiche2]

So with regards to hauling, my current impression is that things might work the following way:

* Dwarves can use bins to collect and haul multiple items at once.
* [speculative?] Stones cannot be hauled in bins (or maybe not at all manually). Wheelbarrows act as bins for hauling stones?
* Minecarts are like wheelbarrows [?], but can be automated (downhill by gravity, uphill by power) and follow tracks. That means no dwarves need to be involved for the hauling part covered by the minecarts at all.

Comments? In particular, presumably because minecarts follow tracks they don't require any pathfinding (other than for loading and unloading items). Could this be a partial solution to our pathfinding FPS woes?

[Kogut]

About slaves, maybe some civs could make use of them?

Unlikely that it is high priority (see The Magnificent Mermaid Farming Nerf).

What was this? (don't smite me, Footkerchief )

At one point merpeople had bones that were ridiculously valuable. So naturally, players started to build forts to capture, breed, and kill them, collecting their bones and selling them to caravans. Then, at some point in the future, merpeople were changed to have ordinary bones. There's a thread somewhere that documents all this.

And then somebody went and started doing it with sea monsters instead.

Sea monsters are not sentient.

Oh. Right. Reading it in context, that makes more sense.

Hehe. BTW, it may be an interesting explanation how magic works in DF multiverse.

[Untelligent]

Comments? In particular, presumably because minecarts follow tracks they don't require any pathfinding (other than for loading and unloading items). Could this be a partial solution to our pathfinding FPS woes?

Probably not. Every dwarf still needs to pathfind, the minecarts just mean they'll spend less time hauling and more time doing other things.

[dreiche2]

Right, but among these other things are jobs that don't require pathfinding. Less pathfinding jobs means less pathfinding.

Moreover, getting rid of some regular long distance pathfinding jobs might be particularly effective, because the pathfinding algorithm effort grows polynomially to exponentially in the distance (meaning that finding a goal 100 tiles away is way worse than finding a set of 10 goals each 10 tiles away).

[nukularpower]

Question:

Are there any plans to implement some kind of camera/view lock system, whereby it's possible to have the game automatically follow a moving object/creature, such as a rolling/flying minecart, up and down Z levels?

 This would make the parabolic feature a lot more fun imo, if you could actually see the path things took through the air.  And I'm sure anyone that has embarked on a hilly area knows how frustrating it can be trying to follow a moving creature yourself.