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[NW_Kohaku]

I do feel like ores should be smeltable into more than one bar, at least. I mean, a one metre by one metre by one metre (if that's what we're calling a tile-it can't be much less) block of stone certainly contains only enough for a wall section or a door, but a one cubic metre block of hematite contains a hell of a lot more ore than needed for a third of a midget-sized breastplate- that's absolutely ridiculous. While I agree with Toady that maybe weapons and armour should take more than one bar, we need to get more than one bar out of a lump of ore. It might be an idea to make the number of bars you get out of a single piece of ore relate to the skill of the furnace operator (so that finally good furnace operators actually mean something), hopefully at the same ratios of the quality levels. Thus, a normal quality smelt would make one bar, but an exceptional would make five and a masterwork twelve.

One meter cubes are far too small for dwarves (much less humans, much less dragons) to fit inside. 

With that said, you have to understand that it's called "ore" and not "a big lump of metal" because it's not just that one metal.  In some extreme cases, like gold cyanide seep leeching, they go through multiple tons of soil just to get a few grams of gold. 

Even when we're talking about the banded iron formations that make up much of the good iron ore (thank you ancient sea life for rusting all the iron into one single sedimentary layer at the bottom of ancient seabeds), where you have a huge layer of actually solid hematite, you're still only going to get roughly 1/12th of the mass of the "ore" to be actual iron.

After all, you don't expect that every diamond deposit in the soil is actually just a solid tile's volume (a cubic meter by your estimation, I would aim more at 27 cubic meters) of a giant pure diamond, do you?  Assume that there is a lot of layer stone in that tile with the diamonds or ores.

[PTTG??]

I do feel like ores should be smeltable into more than one bar, at least. I mean, a one metre by one metre by one metre (if that's what we're calling a tile-it can't be much less)...

I did the math a long time ago and found it was about seven feet tall and about three feet wide. That would mean there's about seven months worth of drinking water in one tile, not counting space for a floor above. But that always starts a fight, so moving on, I see ore seams as the native rock, just shot through with an incursion of the ore. Gems, for instance, aren't a solid 42 cubic foot diamond, just a rock full of a few scattered, normal sized rocks.

I for one want rocks and ore to be unaffected by mining odds (You can always melt rock down for metal, no matter how badly it's chewed up by the miners), but gems are rare enough that a poor miner could destroy them or miss them easily.

[Keldane]

Thank you for answering my question, Toady!

More on topic with the current conversation, I'm in favor of having a variable number of bars produced from each smelting based on the smelter's skill. In the mean time, one bar guaranteed and a few additional at a 10% chance each can be done with modding.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

i'm satisfied with current stone clutter and would like that mining was made more time consuming. i think it makes some sense that even dwarves would set up some wooden shacks faster than they'd be able to dig out an entire street underground.

[NW_Kohaku]

but your thinking as though its old disposal methods, now if we get more crap and stone stockpiles still have their fatal flaw of creating as much room for stone as they create stone then i likely wont play DF for a bit.

I have to assume old disposal methods, as there hasn't been a hint toward new ways to handle stones for storage or new things to do with stone.

Maybe stone stockpiles will be allowed to use bins, once Volume is reconfigured for minecarts.  That'll help greatly with storage.

This would be more easily handled if there were stacking. 

As it stands, 10 stones are 10 unique sets of pointers in several different vectors.  A stack of 10 stones would be one unique set of pointers with a number on the end that says "times 10". 

There was also talk a while ago about having volumes actually matter, and Toady said something earlier in this release cycle about tiles becoming difficult to pass through or possibly even impassible if there was enough junk in the tile.  One suggestion a while ago was to have enough junk in a single tile actually create a "wall" of junk stone, so that if you dumped junk stone into a pit, the pit would eventually become a solid mass of junk stone, and be treated as a wall, rather than an item.  (Which would save on memory and cycle time wasted on iterating through ungodly huge item vectors.)

Currently, item vectors tend to cause subgeometric growth lag problems with item vector size, as vectors are notoriously slow as they become longer than originally intended.  10,000 items will cut your framerate down to a tenth of normal.  100,000 items will cut it down to around 1/400th of normal. 

[HollowClown]

This would be more easily handled if there were stacking. 

As it stands, 10 stones are 10 unique sets of pointers in several different vectors.  A stack of 10 stones would be one unique set of pointers with a number on the end that says "times 10". 

Agreed, but in order for stacking to work, the items you're stacking have to be identical.  Based on some of the things that Toady's been saying, I was under the impression that stones (for instance) were going to get less identical -- for instance, there might be a difference between a stone mined by a novice miner and one mined by a legendary miner.

[MrWiggles]

 I havent gotten that impression at all, do you mind showing where you think Toady has implied that?

[NW_Kohaku]

I havent gotten that impression at all, do you mind showing where you think Toady has implied that?

Hmm... now that you ask that, I can't come up with anything.  I thought it was in the frontpage, but I don't see it now when I look back.  Maybe I read it in the old DF Talks in early April and was confused, or I'm just not hitting upon the exact words he used to search for?  (And I'm 504ing a lot right now, so I'm disinclined to try searching more heavily.)

I recall seeing something about Toady saying he would make tiles that had a threshold value of junk lying around in them slow down movement.

[SeymoreGlass]

I havent gotten that impression at all, do you mind showing where you think Toady has implied that?

I'm not one-hundred percent sure on this, but I think it was hinted at in the most recent (as of this reply) DF Talk. He mentioned that it would take more than a dwarf to move a stone big enough to allow a statue to be carved from it. It's a bit of a leap (and it could possibly mean that all stones would be big enough to carve a statue (as is the case now) and are just treated better), but it may mean that we get different sized stones depending on sminer kill.

If it goes that way, I see miners leaving stones ranging from: heaps of twenty or so small stones (small enough to make stone crafts but not large enough to make a nest box), to piles of a less number of medium stones (big enough for a rock pot or a chair let's say), all the way up to one big tile-sized boulder (big enough for a statue or a door or a single-piece wall). It may be that we get quality markers instead, such as stone vs *<-*stone*->*, which could effect final value of the object it is used to make. Theres also that damnable re-stacking issue to account for.

This seems labour spammy at first, but remember that we're getting a change to allow dwarves to carry multiple objects in one hauling job, so twenty small stones won't lead too any extra tasks over what's done right now; which won't lead to a large amount of extra lag since most of it comes from the pathing demands that hauling jobs create (I understand that storing them in vectors is a bit ineficient when we get to that size, but a pile of ten small stones could be abstracted to be a single "pile of ten stones" item until split by use). Also, if one tile is creating the same volume of stone, but in multiple pieces, storage may not change. Put all the small ones in a bin, and let the large ones stay as is.

That was a lot of musing and fantasizing and hand-waving, but could you (Toady) confirm/deny/expand-upon(/contract-upon?) any of what I've said above? You may not do another Future of the Fortress pass before the release, but would you like to expand upon what will happen in later releases? And if or when it does get another visit, what release cycle might it end up in?

[PTTG??]

I'd be happy with "Rubble" and "Boulders", of which rubble is only good for smelting and maybe wall building and the boulders are what we have now.

[Slax]

With modders more and more diving into firearms, are we going to see any ranged combat updates anytime soon? Aimed shots and such. Something small would suffice for now. Figure it wouldn't be too much work.

[Rockphed]

With modders more and more diving into firearms, are we going to see any ranged combat updates anytime soon? Aimed shots and such. Something small would suffice for now. Figure it wouldn't be too much work.

Toady typically doesn't do things by half measures.  As evidenced by turning "make hauling work better" into "implement mine carts with physics".

[Andeerz]

I assume the current system of powered rails and friction rails are just placeholders until improved mechanisms where they will be replaced with a proper mechanical system.  Am I correct in assuming this?

Is there any advantage to using wood or metal rails as opposed to carved rails other then being able to build on constructed floors.

I don't think rollers and track stops are utterly unreasonable.  New stuff will continue to be added, but I'm not sure these things will be replaced.  Like I said before, I'm not an engineer and don't have any knowledge of what would be proper.

Will we be able to hook animals to minecarts, and have them pull them along? Or have dwarves PULL (as opposed to push) minecarts at all?
Will we be able to put any items in minecarts? Possibly including live animals?
Will we be able to make splits in the tracks, and send carts in different directions?

There is no hooking animals and no pulling.

Awww... this is the only thing that doesn't make me happy about all of this.  I agree that the rollers and stops are not at all unreasonable... I actually think they are really spiffy!  But if Toady is interested in "what would be proper", animals and people pulling (or pushing) stuff and powering whatever mechanisms are the way to go, if you want to look at real-life examples of old mining technology.  I hope animal power and pulling/pushing are eventually part of the game and are applicable to minecarts.

Other than that, though... wow.  This is gonna be frikkin' SWEET.

[MrWiggles]

Animal Hauling is already partly in the game. They have Waiting Post, which have feeds and water for them. But in order to push out the release, they'll probably wont be included in this release.

Though when Toady does go back to Improved Hauling, they'll probably get added in too.

[Cruxador]

With modders more and more diving into firearms, are we going to see any ranged combat updates anytime soon? Aimed shots and such. Something small would suffice for now. Figure it wouldn't be too much work.

Toady typically doesn't do things by half measures.  As evidenced by turning "make hauling work better" into "implement mine carts with physics".

This stuff was all in the thread, though. Check it out: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=78413.0.
Also note this list (presumably from the old dev page) in which the main features were already planned by Toady even before suggestions came up:

Hauling Improvements

• 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