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[GavJ]

I don't think it would be that hard to change pathfinding.

First of all, you'd still allow 2 or 3 creatures in the same tile (you can squeeze past each other, or as the game simulates now, lie down and let them step over you lol).

So therefore an occupied 1 tile path is not an insurmountable obstacle. It is only an issue of shuffling yourselves around so that only 2-3 pass at a time. There is no need to recalc the whole path, that's silly. This can be solved with a subroutine that occurs separately from the broader pathfinding. I.e. your overall path stays the same, but you have a little set of shuffling procedures that all dwarves know in situations where a jam occurs. Like if the limit is 3 per tile, you shuffle to spread yourselves out to max 2 per tile with whatever space is available in the immediate vicinity -- leave your overall path alone, this is just a local temprary search, which functions almost exactly the same as liquid flow. Then they take turns moving through the crowd, and once clear, each dwarf exits the subroutine and continues along the original path. This whole process could take only a handful of ticks for 2-3 dwarfs that happen to collide at once, or it could jam up a hallway for 2 months if you have a rush of 100 dwarves.

This has the side effect that dwarves will not consider taking medium length detours to avoid traffic entirely, but IMO, that seems pretty dwarven logic anyway, almost like a feature.

[Manveru Taurënér]

I don't think it would be that hard to change pathfinding.
...

Maybe not to you, but Toady at least seems to consider it enough of a headache to postpone until changing it really is necessary:

Rainseeker:   Alright, so Jeremy asks: 'Do you intend on changing the way Dwarf Fortress handles multiple entities in the same tile? I was listening to your podcast on cities and couldn't help but visualize streets full of people crawling along on their stomachs just because someone else was standing over them.'
Toady:   Well it certainly would be nice if two people could squeeze by each other without having immediately to slither around like worms, I don't have any specific plans for it, we'll see how the throng ends up when we actually get people wandering around the markets and so on. The thing you've got to avoid is allowing everyone to get into the same tile without any kind of penalty or whatever, then you just end up with five hundred people in the same tile, so there has to be something to it, and it gets a little annoying with keeping pathfinding up to date and other considerations like that, the more rules you put on people in tiles. So there are some attendant headaches to making it seem really reasonable, but certainly the current situation isn't all that ideal either. So we'll see what happens, we'll see what happens. It certainly is not ideal or even acceptable the way, in adventure mode especially, when you're walking around and you want to get through a door and the only way to do it is to dive between someone's legs and then jump back up, or you're trying to get ...
Rainseeker:   And the fact is that they don't care.
Toady:   They don't care at all! They're just like 'Yeah, this is just part of the circus of our life that these rules have made for us', because they're all thinking about doing it too. Everyone's a little tumbler in our universe. So yeah, it's certainly kind of stupid the way it is now, and we'll see when that gets irritating enough for it to just require a change, but like I was saying there are attendant headaches to any change to how it works that makes it not something that I knock off really quickly.

[GavJ]

I think I'm agreeing with Toady. He labeled it a "headache" not a "nightmare" or insurmountable.  It is indeed a headache, yes. And fairly low priority since it's only flavorful realism MOST of the time, more so than game changing utility need. But still certainly not that hard.

[Putnam]

However, if there is a limit on how many Dwarves could fit into a tile, the pathfinder would just try to find a completely different route every time another creature tries to mozzy on through his route...

It already works this way.

[Isngrim]

i already use wide hallways,crowded halls slow down the haulers (i think its because a dwarf has to get on the ground to pass a standing dwarf).

hey Arcvasti,could i use this as my sig?

.... I DO hope that there is eventually either some way for the military to hand off care of their offspring to dwarves in less dangerous lines of work or some way to give the babies chain mail so they are actually viable shields in combat.

[ozyma]

I like the idea that the male-only draft actually started in real life because mothers couldn't figure out how to leave their children at home.