I
am was in favor of multi-tile creatures... I thought: We really should be able to know how large a tile is and how many of what can fit inside before we're ever able to actually do that; otherwise the multi-tile creature who's head which occupies a 3x3 cube will have to explain why an infinite number of dwarves can exist in the center of that creatures' head... As long as they all lay down.
Then there's collision detection and the way they resolve, and the physical locations of body parts, and the implications to combat to worry about; we can't get those stories about tied-up hydra necks in knots without proper multi-tile inter-body collisions, or the grasslands titan using its 6-tile hand to scoop out chunks of rock from the dwarf fortress' main entrance trying to grab them the the proper cave-in code to deal with it!
Oh, wait, that should be a
from a technical and computer-resources standpoint.
Then i thought, maybe multi-tile creatures
shouldn't be done at all due to these headaches when we're dealing with a game engine that doesn't use "this is a very simple to figure out representation" 3D graphics, or doesn't really seemt to use much of a "to the nth decimal place granularity in physical collision detection and display of spatial relationships" 3D engine. I mean come on, we have wagon pullers getting
phased through the 1-tile walls and into magma right now; think of how bad it's going to get when 30 tile tall creatures get their upper bodies removed from the visible game space because 1. the player embarked on a perfectly flat land space and only has a height of 20 tiles above the ground set, 2. stepped on a tree momentarilly adding another 5 tiles to its height, with the tree miraculously supporting the weight for a fraction of an instant, and 3. the titan bleeds to death from trees puncturing his feet, constantly.
Instead, let players simply set how large an excavated tile is in the presently established system
*1. You set the mining designation size counter to 240000, and designate away all the map tiles that can hold
four very average very cramped but *standing* dwarves in them at a time... And in the next tile, a minotaur sized 220000 who is feeling equally cramped... And one tile behind the minotaur, a fully adult dragon who's standing comfortably in a "largest size possible" tile about to breathe fire on everyone, because he can't fit inside where the minotaur and dwarves are. Combat bonuses and penalties would be easier to assign, and jumping or other action resolution simplified computationally under this model as well. You could even create an accurate "too many items on a tile, they spill out nearby" model if you really wanted to... Dare i say it, non-hardcoded liquids.
I don't think we need any multi-tile creatures
*2 we just need better definitions of game space.
*1 any setting could be possible, not just ambiguously relative "volume". If you could describe a hallway in text, if it should be possible under the system: "As tall as a dragon but as narrow as a dwarf" there could be 'floor space' and 'head space' volumes set to 60000 and 25000000 respectively. The actual space and description now fit one another. You can even do a SINGLE math check to see if the dragon will fit: find the largest sized body part, and compare that size to the smallest value (60000) ... The dragon may fit vertically, but it doesn't fit because [body part] relative size is too large for the floorspace value! ... Instead of making a dragon 5 tiles high, carving a space 5 tiles high to match, but having those 5 tiles take up some rediculous % of the map height because the map that was generated was a short one, and then the dragon drowns because its head clipped into the cavern lake above it as it sat in the dragon-sized cubical room outside the dragon-height dwarf-width hallway as it was flying at the time.
*2 including wagons. sorry.
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88 (66.2%)
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Topic: multi tile creatures? (Read 7469 times)