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[Loud Whispers]

Dwarf Dragoons... You could have them haul weapons as civilians on the minecarts to their destinations, then put them on duty.

[Girlinhat]

The rushing minecart strikes the goblin in the upper body, sending the axelord flying!
The flying axelord strikes the troll in the upper body, shattering the ribcage and jamming the right floating rib into the lung!
The troll is having trouble breathing.
The axelord stands up.
The axelord strikes the goblin in the head with his ☼Steel Battleaxe☼ and the severed part flies off in an arc.
The goblin has been struck down!

[Cyroth]

Its missing
"The axelord has lodged firmly in the wound."


First thing I'll do with minecarts is to build a massive mincart railgun that aims at my forts entrance.
Megabeast comes, megabeast gets hit by a 200km/h flying steel minecart.

[Eric Blank]

Megabeast gets a broken leg and shakes it's fist angrily before hobbling off in pain

[Loud Whispers]

Its missing
"The axelord has lodged firmly in the wound."

I'm still waiting for creatures to be able to eat Dwarves whole... And get chopped up from inside out

You could have a Dwarf chucked into some flying beasties mouth, only for said beasty to fly up, explode, and have a bloodied Dwarf calmly step out of the corpse-elevator, into a minecart train of bemused haulers.

[ThtblovesDF]

Even if I am a bit off the general opinion, I would have preferred a effort more focused on the other aspects of the game.

You can always rename a dwarf to "Cart" and only have him on hauler-jobs, to last out till this gets in... instead of say gravity affected massive boulders coming down from the mountains. Or controllable fire. Or catapults that fire-anything.

[Girlinhat]

Even if I am a bit off the general opinion, I would have preferred a effort more focused on the other aspects of the game.

You can always rename a dwarf to "Cart" and only have him on hauler-jobs, to last out till this gets in... instead of say gravity affected massive boulders coming down from the mountains. Or controllable fire. Or catapults that fire-anything.

Congratulations!  Post #666 you've DOOMED US ALL!

[Miuramir]

Thinking on cart logic... while it's not clear what we can do yet in a single plane, it seems to me that we've already got enough info to create controllable logic branches vertically. 

A "switch statement" (aka case, select, or inspect; simplest version is if-then) would be a vertical pit.  For a simple if-then, it's only one level with a single bridge; if the bridge is present (lowered/extended), the mine cart continues across on the same level (Z=0); if the bridge is absent (raised/retracted) the cart drops a level to the tracks below and continues along Z-1.  A more complex if-then-else or switch statement could have a fairly arbitrary number of levels, with bridges on each one; the cart falls until hitting a bridge and then continues along on the level that the bridge is present, or hits the "else" clause floor.  If you're designing mainly in a plane, you can have a ramp up and an appropriate amount of rollers immediately after the pit-switch to return the cart to the same Z plane and approximate speed. 

Logically, this is very slightly less powerful than an arbitrary switch statement in a high level language, as it implies ordered evaluation and can inherently only contain branch statements.  If (bridge0) then (tunnel0) elseif (bridge1) then (tunnel1) ... elseif (bridgeN) then (tunnelN) else (tunnelFloor).  You can mimic a high level switch statement, however, by having the tunnels be short tracks that each do whatever operation you need done (fill, empty, set on fire, etc.), and then use another pit to collect all the tunnels into a single track again. 

Bad attempt at side view:

Code: [Select]

___ ...___?___    |        ____
   |...___?___    |      _/
   |...___?___    |    _/
   |...___?___    |  _/
   |______?_________/
Underscore (_) is track in tunnel; ellipsis (...) is bridge which may or may not be there controlled by lever, pressure plate elsewhere, or whatever logic system you want; question mark (?) is the various processes you want to switch between; slash (/) is ramp up with spots for putting acceleration rollers in between (it's not yet clear whether we can have directly powered ramps).  The width of the two pits needs to increase as you add depth, as the cart will be heading down in an arc and needs to land on its wheels before it smashes into the far wall; depending on speed the above drawing may need to be stretched horizontally quite a bit. 

Edit: Staring at the above, I suspect that the guts of a gravity-powered ripple-carry adder are implied by the concept, although that really isn't my area of expertise. 

[Girlinhat]

Very well described.  That would be a functional logic gate, but I'd redesign the drop-catch part of the pit:

Code: [Select]

_.....__
 \....__
  \...__
   \..__
    \___This design would involve no flight times, so the cart would either hit the bridge and continue straight, or it would hit the ramp and duck down a level.  This should make a much more stable design.

[Miuramir]

...I'd redesign the drop-catch part of the pit:...
This design would involve no flight times, so the cart would either hit the bridge and continue straight, or it would hit the ramp and duck down a level.  This should make a much more stable design.

Now you're just being reasonable, and who wants that?   I mean, you might as well design a system where a "1" is a cart full of lead, and an "0" is an empty cart, rather than having "1" being indicated by "on fire" and "0" being "not yet on fire"...   Seriously, though, your tweak is probably more practical, if less visually compelling.  (My original thought was along the lines of "Dwarves clutching desperately onto the back of a careening iron cart full of burning coal, launched screaming into the darkness of a giant shaft that would make a Sith lord jealous, to hopefully land with a bone-jarring crunch on a matching set of tracks extended somewhere below based on where a curious kitten had wandered recently... it's awesome, but can we make a computer out of it, or is it just an art piece?"

[rtg593]

Hmmm... I see... So my first task, then, will be to build a seige entrance spanning the width of the embark, with a cart acceleration system built in. Seigers trigger plate near end of hall, minecraft machine gun fires, pasting everything in the hall.

Sure, flooding it would be easier, and quicker... But then it wouldn't be using minecarts :p

[khearn]

The downward ramps with bridges seems like a good way to do the branching. But I'm not sure how one would bring the branches back together. If a falling cart will land on tracks without damage, then it's not hard.

Code: [Select]

side view
XXXXXXXXXXX
____  XXXXX
___________
XXXXXXXXXXX
X = walls
_ = rails
Two levels of rails enter from the left and any carts on the top level would fall down one level to the lower track and exit on the right.

But it's not completely clear from what Toady One has said that a cart falling onto a track will automatically land safely. He said "As it stands, launching from one track to another is 100% effective, if you have it lined up." but I'm not 100% sure if "lined up" would include a vertical plunge onto a horizontal track. We'll have to wait and see what works.

You could certainly merge them back by using another ramp/bridge, but you have to make sure the bridge is in the right position every time a cart arrives.

Code: [Select]

XXXXXXXXXXX
_____.____
_____/XXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX
/ = ramp
. = retracing bridge
Carts enter from left, exit on right. If a cart is coming from upper track, bridge *must* be extended. If it's coming from lower track, it *must* be retracted.

Or must it? What happens if the bridge is retracted when a cart comes in on the upper track? Maybe it just leaps the gaps if it's fast enough? Or maybe it can fall onto the ramp and continue? If either of those happens, then we have a way to easily merge tracks.

Also, what happens if a cart comes in on the lower track and the bridge is extended? It will presumably hit the bottom of the bridge, and then what?. Destroy the bridge? Crash the cart? Fall into an eddy in the space-time vortex? We'll find out, eventually.

[Ubiq]

My biggest thought here?  Dedicated hauler class.

I'm hoping that operating Minecarts can be assigned to specific dwarves instead of just randomly picking one; primarily to avoid having a dwarf halfway across the map decide to fill it rather than the dwarf three tiles away. If nothing else, a dwarf having to walk across the fort to load a cart is going to cause problems if the carts are set to leave at certain times.

Plus I really want a Minecart Engineer job if only because I picture them looking like this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Girlinhat]

I went back and handled some random things -- tracks in ice, route/stop nicknames, etc. to avoid storing them up. Next we'll have haulers hitching rides on carts. Hopefully that code linking vehicles/projectiles and units will also set up some horrifying possibilities for collisions of carts and units, which is also coming up.

Nothing as impressive this time, sounds like a bit of drudge coding.  Except the headlines may be foreshadowed.

"300 found dead in massive 750 cart pileup inexplicably located in Olivine Quarry #32"

[Niccolo]

Or catapults that fire-anything.

I would LOVE this.

There is nothing quite so satisfying as flinging a half-tonne of minced goblin at an oncoming goblin horde.

It worked for Genghis khan, it'll work for us.