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Standard: pound, foot, etc.

2 (8%)

Metric: kilogram, meter, etc.

5 (20%)

Dwarfy: urist, urist, etc.

15 (60%)

None / abstract (current)

3 (12%)

Total Members Voted: 24

[SixOfSpades]

Momuz Fathekast, Butcher: "And up there, son, is the great Watchtower of Stinthad, the pride of Clovenditch! It stands a full forty-three z-levels in height!"
Ral Borushlikot, Dwarven Child: "That's great, mom . . . how tall is a z-level, anyway?"
Momuz Fathefast, Butcher: " . . . "


Regardless of how things like the dimensions of a tile are officially defined, how should they be represented in-game?
Standard: Tolkien had his characters express distance in terms of miles, leagues, and even "ells" (whatever they hell they are). However, Toady's dwarves are not Tolkien's dwarves.
Metric: The logical units of choice for just about everybody except the most stubborn nation in the world (America, Fuck Yeah!), but this seems a bit too politically correct for the drunken hooligans we know dorfs to be.
Dwarfy: Have Toady make up some units more concrete than having a maple log weigh "21 palm trees" and have a market price of "3 masterworks", and perhaps have some in-game reference to units of distance.
None: Just leave it unchanged, we all think of these things in whatever terms we want--convenient on the individual player level, but awkward when we try to discuss it.

[GavJ]

It might not be as simple as all that when you say "regardless of how it is in the code" or whatever.

If units line up with the code or game-relevant things or round multiples or denominators of those, they will tend to be round numbers more often and easier to read and to work with for people doing dwarven science, etc. And more easily transferable to the game.

For instance, if speed is measured in tiles/second, then it's going to be a hell of a lot more intuitive than m/s, miles/hour, or really anything else, because most of the time when you care about speed in game, it's going to be tiles you actually want to know about, yeah?

Volume might be measured in barrels (6,000 or 60,000 cm^3, don't remember), as another example. Although milliliters (cm^3) work fine too, since those are nice round numbers everywhere in the code.

But if you were to do fluid ounces or something, then everything would be 0.73198 of them, and stuff.

[Bumber]

Everything is measured in Urist (☼) units. Everything.

(It's all predominantly metric in the code.)

[Deepblade]

Whenever someone says a measurement of Urists I think that the dwarves are measuring everything by daggers.

[Dirst]

Whenever someone says a measurement of Urists I think that the dwarves are measuring everything by daggers.

The Urist is basically a play on the Smoot, except that a Smoot merely measures length while a Urist can measure length, mass or temperature.  That way you can determine thermal insulation as the gradient of Urists per Urist per Urist and no one has any idea what you are talking about.

Right now, Wikipedia redirects a search for Urist to the article on Dwarf Fortress without any mention in that article of who or what Urist is.  I think it'd be better to put Urist on Wikipedia's list of humorous units of measurement and redirect searches for Urist to there, except I have no idea how to do redirects.

[Defacto]

It's all excellently elegant, really.

See, here is an Uni-Urist, it is one Urist long, one Urist tall, one Urist heavy, one Urist warm, and the density of the uni-Urist is one Urist/UristUristUrist at the temperature of one Urist and the air pressure of one Urist/UristUrist. The heat capacity is one kiloUrist/kiloUristUrist. The velocity of the object is always one Urist/Urist.

This is bound to have that child shut up about z-levels and have it do important things in life, like mining, praising Armok, gathering socks, and drowning in lava. 

[SixOfSpades]

See, part of the problem is that I'd like dwarves to be able to decorate their halls with rich tapestries and carpets--the latter of which would also double as floor mats, so dwarves would have a very FPS-friendly way to wipe their feet as they come inside. Now, once a tapestry or carpet has been made, it would be rather nonsensical if it could change size & shape (yes, you could fold it over, but it would still have set dimensions). So the description of these items would have to read something like this:

This is a rope reed floor mat. It measures something by something else in size. It is decorated with smears of goblin blood.

Otherwise, players wouldn't have any way of checking to see if this was the carpet they made to fit the 2-tile-wide hallway, or for the 10-tile-wide solarium.

[GavJ]

Completely aside from the units issue, that sounds extraordinarily annoying to deal with.

Just make floor mats 1x1 tiles only. And then GRAPHICALLY you can have them knit together using the same sort of code that bridges use, updating dynamically as you lay them down or pick them up, but still technically many 1x1 tiles.

Much happier player I would be than micromanaging 17 different bespoke rugs. Helpful labels or not.

</offtopic>

[SixOfSpades]

A patchwork of 1x1 tiles would almost certainly result in a hodgepodge of different fabrics thrown together--which could be micromanaged so that their different colors form a nice pattern, true, but when you take into account the different wear rates of different fabrics, your "graphically unified" carpet would have to have separate wear values for every single tile. Sure, if you want to have to keep cutting out & replacing the spider-silk squares while the squares woven from hemp are still good as new, you go ahead & do that. Mark me up for those 17 labeled rugs that I can place & replace as discrete units. As far as decorating the dining hall, I'd be far happier with a 3x10 tapestries depicting scenes visible from the far end of the room, than seeing the grandeur of my fort represented by some random crazy quilt hanging on the wall.

But back to units: If not carpets, then ropes & chains. Is this the really long chain that was made to enable the well to reach all the way down into the caverns? Or the really short chain that was made for the prison cells?

[Bumber]

You could have the carpets act just like roads. More area requires more carpets, and they all take on the color of the first chosen.

[GavJ]

A patchwork of 1x1 tiles would almost certainly result in a hodgepodge of different fabrics thrown together

No just do it like floors and everything else in the game that uses 1x1 covered areas. It brings up a menu of available materials and you choose for each one by hitting enter on it that many times. This is already widely used in game to allow consistent color matching.