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[Romegypt]

Make it so that a 3x3 creature (Like a wagon) can change it's shape, to model the body twisting and turning. For example, a dragon could be something like 3x4, and become a 2x6. It must stay within the amount of tiles, so the dragon could never have less or more than twelve tiles. There should also be a minimum for how thin/wide things can be, so a dragon can't just become a long string like a 1x12 and slip through corridors.

 Also, give them tiles above, so that a dragon can't come in a hole the size of a mouse.

[StagnantSoul]

Doors would become immune to all but the smallest enemies.

[Witty]

And? Having a small entrance to fend off the massive critter is a pretty common trope. Besides, now you've got a huge monstrosity blocking you off from the outside world/underground. Seems like a fair trade off, or it will be when the outside world is needed to manage a proper fort.

And that's bound to come before we ever see large creatures go multi-tile.

[Orange Wizard]

Multi-tile creatures are already planned.

[dwarf_reform]

I assume the majority of them would be able to knock down a generic DF door, if only by accident.. And I think one of the greater woes of roguelike ascii gaming is that the dev/s generally never plan for multi-tile creatures and the general framework almost never accepts them..

Just that its planned is fantastic Multi-tile FBs could get very, very interesting :>

[neblime]

I find it difficult to imagine how this will be implemented though, without some kind of change to how the graphics work.  Do you just have the same symbol for the whole body? (actually now that I think about it that wouldn't work too badly with default ascii.. just a bunch of Cs for a collossus)

[SixOfSpades]

Do you just have the same symbol for the whole body?

As trees already use different symbols for their different parts, I'm guessing no.

And I support large creatures being stopped by 1-tile doorways only if most multitile creatures are able to smash their way through most constructed (and even some natural) walls. Like the Kool-Aid Man, but with less diabetes and more subdermal hemorrhaging.

[StagnantSoul]

Like the Kool-Aid Man, but with less diabetes and more subdermal hemorrhaging.

YES!

[Bumber]

It's going to be difficult enough for Toady to rework the pathing for a fixed multi-tile shape. I can't imagine the difficulty involved if those shapes can change.

As trees already use different symbols for their different parts, I'm guessing no.

Trees aren't creatures. Wagons are a more apt example.

[AdeptAdventurer]

Doors would become immune to all but the smallest enemies.

Not necessarily. You think a Bronze Colossus would just sit outside your door and be like "awww, I'm too big?"

It should start kicking your door and walls.

[StagnantSoul]

I'm saying with current physics. Also, it would take forever for them to get to an underground fortress, and I'd rather not see half the map ruined because a creature attacked. I'd rather we stuck to the one tiles after thinking over it.

[GavJ]

It's going to be difficult enough for Toady to rework the pathing for a fixed multi-tile shape. I can't imagine the difficulty involved if those shapes can change.

The initial pathing actually sounds a lot trickier to code to me than the shape changing. Shape changing is just the initial pathing code, but rechecking for a couple different other shapes when you seem to hit a bottleneck. That's like, an extra for loop.  (okay more realistically you'd want to code in some heuristics for choosing which shapes to try, but still not that bad).

FPS-wise, it is a daunting prospect though. Pathing x 8 shapes for everything on top of already multi-pathing for the body.

[Sirbug]

Square creatures already know how to path (wagons). Awfully long snakes seem like trivial pathing problem too.

Now fixed non-square ones is a problem.

[Dirst]

Rather than coding multiple explicit tile dimensions, I think it be better to let the raws declare proportions and have the game figure out how many tiles the creature occupies.  That automagically handles child forms, exceptionally large specimens, etc.

The creature will fully occupy any "interior" tiles in its bounding box, and occupy a portion of the border tiles.  How much space is left will determine if another creature can occupy the same tile, or whether it needs to "squeeze in" (which is currently implemented as being "prone").

The focal creature can "squeeze in" to try to get through small openings, which puts it in a vulnerable prone-like state perhaps with its own gaits.  Note that a fortification opening, space between bars, etc. is smaller than a hallway, but could be effectively open space to small critters.  A new tag or two can handle particularly flexible creatures (octopi, Shibboleths, blood men, etc.) and particularly inflexible ones (amethyst man, etc.) with some numeric rating of how well they handle "squeezing."

No matter how much we strive for realism, there will still be those fun DF moments when a kea picks up an anvil and flees the fort through a tiny opening.

[Sirbug]

I do think ceiling might be a problem. Multi-tile height will be pretty frustrating for anything non-interactive and pancake creatures would for the most part look weird.