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Author Topic: [Construction] Tiered Building Construction & Templates  (Read 1548 times)

jetex1911

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[Construction] Tiered Building Construction & Templates
« on: October 31, 2013, 10:48:46 pm »

Find building multi-storied buildings tedious and annoying? Wish you could just save a room and be able to just copy & paste it? Then I've got the suggestions for you!

For the first suggestion, you can have it so that buildings are constructed part by part if you so desire. I'm talking about telling your dwarves to build the walls, then the scaffold, and then finally the roof & floor to your house, in that order. You just simply construct the first part of what your building; The walls of the house, basic structure of a grand bridge, or even the first floor of a tower; and then press a hotkey to start laying out what to do next. I think this would make creating superstructures less annoying, and would be a nice addition to basic construction.

Now, to the second part of my suggestion: A template system that you can use to copy a building/room/whatever, and then either use it, or save for later times. You could have it so that specific materials are used for whenever you order the template constructed, or set it to use whatever materials related to what you used before be utilized. But it isn't just for you: The template can be saved to a text file and shared on the forums! Need a basic keep for the surface of your fortress? Maybe someone else made one!

Feel free to leave any criticisms/mini-suggestions/commentary.
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hermes

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Re: [Construction] Tiered Building Construction & Templates
« Reply #1 on: November 04, 2013, 05:52:00 am »

Feel free to leave any criticisms/mini-suggestions/commentary.

I like your avatar very much!

Nice idea... got me thinking that perhaps one might generalize the whole system to be rather than a key-press macro system, a construction macro system.  Then it would naturally extend to traps, minecarts, defenses etc. in addition to buildings.  Perhaps for such a system to work, you might have to designate a 3D volume within which to record, then just start and stop it.  When played back, the game would just designate jobs to create the required pieces in sequence.

There are all kinds of other issues though, like material availability, job designations and so on, that would make it non-trivial to program.  I guess...   :-\

Maybe your idea of some preset "parts" and templates would be simpler and better.  A 3D volume template-grab would be nice, though would need extra logic programming for the game to work out how to reproduce it.
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Bumber

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Re: [Construction] Tiered Building Construction & Templates
« Reply #2 on: November 04, 2013, 04:04:40 pm »

I've never used these, but do either DF Designator or QuickFort do something like the second part?
« Last Edit: November 04, 2013, 04:06:42 pm by Bumber »
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Waparius

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Re: [Construction] Tiered Building Construction & Templates
« Reply #3 on: November 05, 2013, 08:07:22 pm »

I've suggested something pretty similar to this for how architecture ought to work - setting up constructions according to what will be linked up rather than what can currently be connected, with architecture becoming required for hanging structures (meaning you don't need one for walls or if you want to push it something like a pyramid, but they're still necessary for bridging gaps and making multistorey buildings). Maybe this could be folded in together with your first suggestion.

I'm not so sure about suggestion number 2, but then I like designing my forts to fit their surroundings. *shrug*
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Xazo-Tak

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Re: [Construction] Tiered Building Construction & Templates
« Reply #4 on: November 09, 2013, 09:41:13 pm »

It would be easier just to make planned constructions behave like real constructions when it comes to designating more constructions.
Although unless the building AI got a nice big improvement, wall corners would still be a problem.
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