Hello!
I'd like to make a proposal to incorporate fliying creatures into the existing projectile/minecart framework.
Right now, fliers are just kind of detached from the world with its physics and mechanics: they are free to go in any of 26 possible directions and have no inertia nor momentum. This was good as a rough approximation, but now that there are actual flying (falling) objects and creatures in the world, it's looking weird. I suggest a generalization of minecart and projectile framework to include fliers.
Instead of just modelling the birds and alike with a single [FLIER] tag (sometimes attached to a bodypart), I suggest tags like [LIFT:N], [FLAP:N], [FLOAT:N] attached to certain bodyparts or even wielded objects.
[LIFT:N] tag would mean that the affected bodypart is capable of a force proportional or somehow correlated with movement speed.
[FLAP:N] tag would mean that tha same force may be generated at will at the expense of fatique points.
[FLOAT:N] would mean that the lifting force of value up to N may be generated (or even just plain "is generated") regardless of anything, and exist to model levitating wizards, cave floaters, or methane-bladdered dragons, if they get into the game.
Apart from these tags, flying creatures I believe should be treated exactly like projectiles or derailed minecarts.
These changed would make birds much faster, their movements much more erratic and unpredictable, and their attacks potentially more deadly, if the game learns to take the speed of the attacking creature itself into account when calculating attacks. Most of all though, I believe it would make flying cratures much more feasible and realistic.
The largest obstacle as I see it would be programming a new pathfinding and generally flying AI to respect these rules of movement and utilise them for its advantage. However, as we seem to not have any flier AI right now, I suppose something is planned to appear at some point, and I believe that this suggestion is both more fun and more consistent that the old-fashioned tile-by-tile flight.
sorry if already suggested, it's just that the search by "flight lift" only yielded me methane-bladdered dragons. awesome idea.