Print

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

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, perhaps that was phrased poorly...

Mining shouldn't be too easy, but likewise it shouldn't be too hard. That's what I was saying. Above all, it should be easy on the CPU and not require too much micromanagement to dig a tunnel.

If you have pre-designated rubble-clearing teams and places to drop the rubble, the only additional micromanagement (besides maybe needing to order more wheelbarrows) would be watching where the rubble is being dumped to make sure it doesn't overfill, and designating new areas for dumping. 

Likewise, that would only be as CPU-intensive as any other hauling job that automatically appears and flags a stockpiling job.  If rubble is re-compacted into rubble walls, it eliminates the long-term item clutter problems. If rubble is otherwise eliminated from the map (as by off-map dumping, catapulting off of the map, or dumping into magma or any other method) then it likewise avoids long-term clutter problems.

Mining in general needs more than just to be slower, of course - the concept of structural integrity/ceiling collapse/more advanced cave-ins need to be re-introduced, geological structures and hazards like methane pockets, and the whole concept of air quality/oxygen depletion.  However, slower mining in and of itself is the simplest method to accomplish a start.

[zkenyon]

the point is not to add fun, but to contribute to the model, in the hopes that the aggregate will be fun...

and it doesn't interfere with pathfinding as much as you think.

[assasin]

I guess this all depends on how much micromanagement the game will end up with. The problem I have is that designating takes a lot of time for things like bedrooms and whatever. And you have to do it when the game is paused. ugh. If there was a quickfort-like  system to designate and a similar sort of system to control work crews and labour I could see other factors being added. But otherwise it'd just make mining as boring as hell.

Other factors I could see if designating was faster would be things like faults in the rock and gas pockets. The faults would mean supports would need to be added to stop caveins and good airflow and ventillation would need to be planned for for the gas. Other things like lighting a temperature control could also be added [from what i've heard two km down is extremely hot].

Specifically on the rubble or whatever at most I can see rubble slowing dwarves down. Maybe half their ussual speed or whatever. But if this is the case I would also like to see easier control over hauling crews and stuff.

Heres how I could see it working. One dwarf is sent in as a canary to check for dangers. Then the second crew mines everything out with a hauling crew behind them taking away the rocks as they mine. As the rocks are removed the engineers start building supports to stop any spontaneous caveins.

[DG]

Improving mining to require more time, thought and dwarf labour would be fun for me. Obviously there are people who would dislike it. What if in the future the player is able to take control of predefined sites created in worldgen by their civilization? In that way you can have largely pre-dug shells for people who don't want to wait or deal with more realistic mining. It's not perfect because players like to pick their own embark sites and have more ownership of the initial design. Its an idea I came up with when considering how to bridge the gap between people who want two different games.

[NW_Kohaku]

Improving mining to require more time, thought and dwarf labour would be fun for me. Obviously there are people who would dislike it. What if in the future the player is able to take control of predefined sites created in worldgen by their civilization? In that way you can have largely pre-dug shells for people who don't want to wait or deal with more realistic mining. It's not perfect because players like to pick their own embark sites and have more ownership of the initial design. Its an idea I came up with when considering how to bridge the gap between people who want two different games.

Well, at a basic level, the people who want to play "Dwarf Legos" and just make megaproject castles while invasions and eating and drinking and sleeping are off might certainly want no-rubble options.  People who don't want a game where survival and expansion are supposed to be serious challenges are never going to be satisfied with any changes to the game that make survival and expansion more difficult as a rule of thumb.

On the other hand, and while this is threatening the airspace of totally off-topic, I do hope to one day see raw-definable worldgen cities that would allow players to actually make these quickfort-type plans for fortresses that get built by worldgen dwarves.

At the same time, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to claim worldgen cities as long as cities take up space larger than a single local map tile (we can't embark on a 17x17 chunk of terrain that stretches into 4 different local map tiles) and as long as cities have populations of up to 5-digits, when players can barely handle 3-digit populations in 3x3 embarks.

[Spyton]

Just throwing suggestions out there, Maybe when you mine, the square will automaticaly be filled with four (or X) Items. Items have the chance to be Ore, Boulder, or rubble. Any squares with more than 1 of these rubble blocks in it will be impassible, or slow down activities such as walking, hauling, and mining, or maybe it makes hauling/building on it impossible.

Ores and boulders act exactly as they do now.

If you were to dig certain structures out of the ground like stairs, it would produce different amounts of products, as stairs in an unmined area would only produce either one or 2 products, And all products would tend to slide down the stairs, like water.

Rubble will have its own stockpiles to the stockpile, like refuse. Heres where it gets fun, Rubble can then be used to make ground because any rubble not stacked on its original site to an amount of 4 (or X) Becomes Actual ground again with some differences.

- Its much easier to redig, atleast for a while.
- The stockpiles for rubble can actualy span z levels so dwarves can, without micromanagement, move it to predesignated areas.
    - Or of course be shot off screen with a catapult.
- Any objects on the same tile as rubble when it reforms to ground gets either buried or shoved to an empty space and can be regained by digging. Or can simply be destroyed, but it would be interesting to gain "artifacts" from an ancient civilization in this manner.
- It creates ramps on all sides of it, like real dirt does when it is heaped into piles.
   - A side note is i believe it would have to behave some what like water by cascading to create the ramps and instead of just stacking straight up into piles of 4 (or X) the third (or topmost) pile would slide off to a neigboring piece of ground that had zero or only one piece rubble on it.
- Rubble works like a slope if its only 2-3 rubbles high.

To me this is both realistic, has little to no micromanagement... atleast in theory,  and adds to the flavor of the game while possibly, if the cons were added to it, make mining your fortress a little more daunting than "Lets Designate Here" Bonus is that it allows you to replace ground!

This is a rough idea obviously but still I think its a good way of solving the problem.

On top of this i would'nt be against minor miner snags to challenge the players more, like Your miners have run into a crevace, wich ranges on z levels and width of empty space in the ground. At worst it makes you have to build a bridge accros it, at best you mined into it at the bottom and you wanted that space cleared anyway.

[DG]

Well, at a basic level, the people who want to play "Dwarf Legos" and just make megaproject castles while invasions and eating and drinking and sleeping are off might certainly want no-rubble options.  People who don't want a game where survival and expansion are supposed to be serious challenges are never going to be satisfied with any changes to the game that make survival and expansion more difficult as a rule of thumb.

Agreed. But from things that Toady has said I get the feeling that he's much more likely to keep mining as it is rather than something you and I would prefer. I doubt that our mining wishes will ever become mainstream DF, though I hope I'm wrong. A option between play styles was one way forward I could think of.

At the same time, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to claim worldgen cities as long as cities take up space larger than a single local map tile (we can't embark on a 17x17 chunk of terrain that stretches into 4 different local map tiles) and as long as cities have populations of up to 5-digits, when players can barely handle 3-digit populations in 3x3 embarks.

Yeah, I should have expanded on what I meant by predefined sites. I meant that the game could specifically seed sites around the world that are small enough and optimized to be taken over by players and run as fortresses without difficulty.

[Pootis]

My general position on this is that making the game more difficult by introducing realism is a good thing.
Having rubble that I'd have to actually devise a system to remove in order to use my tunnels sounds like it would present an interesting logistical challenge.

And I love logistical challenges.

This would also open up the possibility of constructing earthworks, since digging in soil currently vaporizes all of it.
You could build defenses, or cover your wooden structures with a layer of earth to protect from dragonfire, or something. Lots of fun stuff.

[teloft]

Solution

Stones - rubble

7/7 - Miner is starting to work
6/7
5/7
4/7 - Ramp
3/7 - Miner can access the next tile
2/7
1/7
0/7 - Mined out

It could be like liquid, except there will be no flow-calculations (only cave ins!!)

Assign an area for rubble/stone/...

Teleport/trow (limited range) material automatically up to surface, or to other designated areas, like... next to the chart. (do not make the material vanish!!)... everyone is happy.

[Waparius]

Not a programmer, but would it be easy to make cave-ins work by calculating the number of ceiling tiles directly connected to each other? That would allow the use of crude arches as well as pillars and thus a way to make large open caverns work as well.

What I mean is, if it used the old-style cave-in-if-there's-a-7x7-space (for the sake of argument - IMO the amount of ceiling space should ultimately depend on materials), then you'd get a cave-in on a room with a flat 7x7 ceiling, but if you were to carve a single open/channeled block in the layer directly above this room, it would not count as a 7x7 ceiling, and therefore it wouldn't fall in, just as placing a support or leaving a pillar in the room would keep it secure in the old 2D model. In effect it would make vaulted ceilings or support pillars a necessary element of room design, but since we can already use ramps to dig uphill this shouldn't be too onerous for the player.

Obviously the 7x7 is a random placeholder example, and different materials should have different levels of strength-before-collapse, though that brings up tthe issue of digging through veins of different materials. But would this otherwise be relatively easy to implement?

[fractalman]

It would also be extremely annoying to new players...especially since there are soo many types of stone to begin with.  Maybe if it were changed to a minimum of 11x11 areas instead, so that easy-to-draw 10x10 regions are still fine...
maybe. 

[CrzyMonkeyNinja]

I think teloft and Spyton have the right idea. Allowing us to re-form the rubble into walls would make for Roman military camp style walls where the walls are made of the dirt dug out of the spike-filled trenches in front of them. This function could actually HELP noobs to get some defences up early without needing to carve a quarry or a huge fortress first. It would also be helpful for once goblins have better siege tactics so that they can mine out some rubble/dirt, then form a ramp to scale your walls or fill in your moat to get across.

[Waparius]

It would also be extremely annoying to new players...especially since there are soo many types of stone to begin with.  Maybe if it were changed to a minimum of 11x11 areas instead, so that easy-to-draw 10x10 regions are still fine...
maybe.

The game's annoying enough to new players anyway, IMO. It's not that hard to leave a pillar in the middle of every 11x11 square, I do it myself for aesthetics' sake.

Though it'd probably be better to put init options in to have cave ins from none to what they currently are to 7x7 to material-based, with the game warning you when you're in danger of caving the place in, just as it does now with damp/warm stone.

[assasin]

The game's annoying enough to new players anyway, IMO. It's not that hard to leave a pillar in the middle of every 11x11 square, I do it myself for aesthetics' sake.

I find this to be a bit too shallow. Instead I'd have faults running semirandomly through the rock. Sure, pillars could be used as general stabalisation a lot of the time, in certain places more elaborate walls and supports would need to be used. There'd need to be a way to prospect the fault though. Maybe a game warning like you said and then have the fault flash in several different colours to show the various states and have the player decide whether to dig out the entire unstable area of build walls and supports to stop a cavein or a combo of the two.

[Byakugan01]

Faults would be interesting...not in the least because with certain kinds of faults, deeper rock layers could be-relatively speaking-closer or deeper from the surface compared with their respective layer on the other side of the fault. As on the subject of rubble...while new players would be helped out by being able to use rubble to build fortifications, the stuff down in the mines would seriously hinder them, as would being unable to drag rocks past other rocks (to say nothing of getting sieges when all you have is a cave!). While this wouldn't be an issue if we were playing human fortress (and most building was done above ground in any case...), in DWARF fortress, where virtually all building is done below ground, it would become a serious issue, considering none of the other races need to put up with it to the extent dwarves do.

Heck, there are any number of geological or other features that could fundamentally change how mining works. Making picks able to wear down is an easy, non geological change, with them becoming less effective over time even as miner skill increases, until they get repaired at a forge or just plain break and you need a new one. Domes would change the strata layers, just like faults would, with the potential of revealing what is further down if you have an eroded one (heck, why not fall in normal synclines and anticlines while we're at it). Heck, include salt domes filled with oil and natural gas, and give them their respective properties (remember, natural gas is odorless, so you would have to know it was there to detect it!)-I'm sure players will find some use for them. And they'll create yet another liquid barrier to expansion while we're at it. While we're at it, let's include gas pockets which become more common the farther down you dig, and need to be dealt with (detonation or dispersal-knockermen anybody?) before proceeding further. And to make the gas pockets a real threat, how about needing to light up your mine workings with placed or carried torches, which can also fight cave adaptation? If a miner works in the dark, then he becomes less effective. Heck, ALL dwarves become less effective when working without light until they become cave adapted, and their ability to detect threats is reduced regardless of whether they are cave adapted or not if they don't have a light source. Any combination of these changes would make mining a much more involved task for the player, without necessarily being a pain in the ass.