Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[GreatWyrmGold]

I don't know how sticky or viscous it needs to be, but I'd imagine that, at a minimum, some unpleasant procedurally generated stuff would be. In any case, honey would be better than oil, no? Therefore, it makes sense to have a progression of "Severely hurts your clinging abilities" to "Slightly impairs your clinging abilities" to "Helps you cling."

Try thinking about the ration of adhesive-covered surface to body mass - you'd need some damn good glue to stick to the wall. That's why a gecko can run up a window, but you won't be dooing that anytime soon.

Actually, geckos walk on walls due to various electromagnetic forces in the ends of microscopic hairs called setae. These are capable of holding humans, if you made enough artificial setae.

Yeah, they aren't actually using glue - but the same principle applies: The force/surface ratio is way too high with humans.

I'm pretty sure the artificial setae would let one climb up a wall. Either that, or everything I've read about them has mislead me.
Still, I'd gladly accept that neither real materials nor real climbing techniques would allow this, if you'll accept that some such result should be possible by modding in absurd numbers on a progression from "oily" to "honeyey".

[King Mir]

Perhaps contaminants on walls could work like underbrush on the ground, that is, slow movement by a fixed amount. Then you can make rock-nut oil slow climbing a lot, and blood not slow climbing much at all. And the path finding algorithm would take that information into consideration as a tile cost.

[GreatWyrmGold]

And honey would slow climbing a little, and we could mod in liquids which accelerate climbing but have a contact syndrome...I like it!

[Funburns]

This sounds like a great idea. Striking a balance between trivializing maintenance (like omnipresent masterwork gears not requiring lubricant...) and creating heavy burdens (How do you lube a gear submerged in lava? Would there be magmaproof oil, perhaps denser than magma and dropped from above or lighter and released from below?) is worth thinking about.

Maybe when Toady implements fine piping for water, automated lubrication systems could be added as well. Or axles could have a system of oil channels crafted into them as an advanced process.

Perhaps complex gear systems should be required to be 100% dwarf-accessible, and special machine layouts used for hostile environments, making lubrication an intentionally difficult or realistic problem which players' creativity would be expected to solve.

If Toady opens up new types of liquid, oil-submerged gear chambers might also be an interesting angle to look at, though compared to piping that seems a bit of a blunt implementation; it could be added merely incidentally, next to a more direct solution.

It's also worth considering that building degradation would be an excellent excuse to add a more general game mechanic. If a mechanism needs regular maintenance, maybe a shrine to a god could use the same code at some point in the future with different effects, skills and material requirements. Dwarves with the mechanics labor (would a separate labor be needed for the scale of this task?) toggled on could lube gears, while architects might go back and re-examine low quality or damaged bridges to repair or upgrade them. In the distant future, it might be a good idea for an architect to check the structural support columns holding up the roof every few dwarf years (unless they're made with artifact blocks, strong metals or natural stone (think cast obsidian)..?).

Whichever solution is used, managing lubrication should be as simple as building the right machinery in the right places, setting labors and then ensuring there's enough oil in stock. More advanced features, like individual toggling, should be mostly unnecessary unless someone wants to spend time optimizing things.