Yeah, in a way, I kind of like the predictability of the old way. I know it sucks for teh noobs, but having a known quantity when you understand that a dwarf will always prefer the west side of any wall in construction means that you can just use the workaround of designating a wall for construction then suspending construction to always manage where a dwarf will stand.
Of course, given the way he talked about it in the FotF,
They keep track of the first valid square they walk through from the beginning of the job, and then use that when they have the material. That stops it from taking the hit on doing extra pathing checks, but I don't think it would be easy to avoid many simultaneous jobs that have a potentially complicated configuration from walling people in. Outside factors can still cause trouble. That's virtually unavoidable. In the two wall case, if one of the walls is finished while the other dwarf is still fishing for stone off in the dead-end AND the first square they walked in wasn't the good square but the other wall's square, then they will still make the mistake. Doing the extra pathing calculation is not possible without killing the processor the way things are set up, but they'll also often make the correct decision in multi-wall cases (whereas they'd often be systematically failing them before).
then it really should be OK to just ignore it in most circumstances, since the dwarf will be building the wall from the direction they approached the wall from, which would be the most intuitive direction, and as long as you keep the building materials on the side of the wall you want them to be building from, it should be fairly controllable under most circumstances, as well. I just get the premonition, however, that some dwarves will do a traffic sidestep and wall themselves in occasionally for that.
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Topic: No more self-entombing builders? (Read 1956 times)