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[King_of_Baboons]

It is no secret that a lot people want multi-tile stuff added in Dwarf Fortress and several threads were created to discuss their mechanics and how they act in game.But instead of just thinking about how they would work and act....how about we try to create their appearance instead?

So while we wait Toady to release the taverns update we can have some fun trying to draw multi-tile items,buildings and creatures since those kind things are going to take a very long time to be officially added.

Here is my attempt to create some sort of giant snake:

Δ
╚══╗
      ║
      ║   
  ╒═╝☻

☻=Regular dwarf
Δ=Head
╚=Body

Use this website to get the ASCII symbols for your object

Have fun drawing your creatures!

[§k]

ettin : çOç

-edit-

hydra :
ççç
çSç
ççç

giraffe standing by a shrub :
...  z1
.ç.
...

`.'  z0
"h`
,`.

[neblime]

I think a snake is the easiest thingg to work out hehe.
what do you do with humanoids who are multi z levels tall?  Do you just do sort of a cross section?  Also can they lie down and crawl into 1z high spaces?  I hav no idea whether it will be difficult to program or not but I think multi tile creatures are one of the more difficult things to figure out conceptually

[4maskwolf]

I think a snake is the easiest thingg to work out hehe.
what do you do with humanoids who are multi z levels tall?  Do you just do sort of a cross section?  Also can they lie down and crawl into 1z high spaces?  I hav no idea whether it will be difficult to program or not but I think multi tile creatures are one of the more difficult things to figure out conceptually

On top of which, if large creatures aren't given a way to move in small spaces or if you aren't given an incentive to make excessively tall entraces (or wide ones) you can neutralize many of what are currently the most threatening things in the game (Megabeasts, for instance) by just not building places that are accessible to them.

[LMeire]

I think we'll see more realistic seiging before we do multi-tile monsters, so the threat of a dragon wouldn't be a giant lizard-thing impotently trying to burn everything through the tiny entrances, it would be a a giant lizard-thing literally knocking your castle over, smashing through the floor to the rest and then burning the survivors.

[Sizik]

I think we'll see more realistic seiging before we do multi-tile monsters, so the threat of a dragon wouldn't be a giant lizard-thing impotently trying to burn everything through the tiny entrances, it would be a a giant lizard-thing literally knocking your castle over, smashing through the floor to the rest and then burning the survivors.

And siege engines could be implemented as multi-tile "creatures", similar to wagons.

[evictedSaint]

Well, I think the problem stems from large creatures with complex body parts.

Do all giants become big "T" 's walking around?  What about super-gigantic creatures? It's easy to see how a snake's body would move and change depending on where it's going and what it's doing, but it gets a bit more tricky for more complex creatures.  How does this relate to pathing, too?  Can these super-large creatures fit through the same space a dwarf can?  If not, how do you make the pathing reflect the shape of the creature?  If the creature can change it's depicted shape, how does pathing reflect this when the creature attempts to squeeze into a doorway?  How does climbing work when the creature is large enough that you can see it's hands?  Can a five-tile giant, large enough to swallow elephants whole, be rendered immobile by a particularly dense patch of willow trees?  Caves would need to be revamped, too, in order to house these super-sized creatures.  What about graphics packs, how do they relate to the suddenly multi-tile creatures?

[Dirst]

Well, I think the problem stems from large creatures with complex body parts.

Do all giants become big "T" 's walking around?  What about super-gigantic creatures? It's easy to see how a snake's body would move and change depending on where it's going and what it's doing, but it gets a bit more tricky for more complex creatures.  How does this relate to pathing, too?  Can these super-large creatures fit through the same space a dwarf can?  If not, how do you make the pathing reflect the shape of the creature?  If the creature can change it's depicted shape, how does pathing reflect this when the creature attempts to squeeze into a doorway?  How does climbing work when the creature is large enough that you can see it's hands?  Can a five-tile giant, large enough to swallow elephants whole, be rendered immobile by a particularly dense patch of willow trees?  Caves would need to be revamped, too, in order to house these super-sized creatures.  What about graphics packs, how do they relate to the suddenly multi-tile creatures?

If we're still viewing one-Z-thick slices of the terrain at the time multi-tile creatures appear, then yes these will all be problems.  An isometric view just turns this into a problem of scaling and adding alternate frames.

[mndfreeze]

The simple way would be to deal with size in the numbers on the back end which pretty much already happens, and just represent the creatures with more tiles that are fixed in place.  So no snake thats 8 tiles long with tiles that move individually to show movement.  Instead the giant snake should just be 8x1 with all tiles completely locked in place together.

I dont know off the top of my head how much in size each tile represents, 10 feet, or 5 feet or whatnot.  But a giant thats 20 feet tall and 10 feet or less wide could just be 2 tiles assuming a tile is 10 feet in measurement.

G
G

Giant snake thats 40 feet long

S
S
S
S

Making each tile so they move independently I think would way overcomplicate the system with minimal benefit.

[TechnoXan]

So vehicles (catapults and Rams, etc) and large creatures. Sounds good! But their are sooo many problems with all this. I feel that pathing  and combat would be major. I am not a programmer or anything and I'm just thinking out loud. Correct me if I am wrong but wouldent pathing be normal exept for z-levels. Wagons already take up three spaces by three spaces horizontally. And then would our pathetic brave Dwarfs only be able to lacirate their feet? Or would they knock him down or climb up this hypothetical beast?     Either way I really want this to happen because I always thought "why is this gigantic half Dragon the size of a Dwarf?" I know this is insanely complicated and I am definitely not whining about the size of my dragon.

[Dirst]

Pathing in DF is already hitting performance bottlenecks, and that's with a big simplification to make flying creatures fairly nearsighted.  Extending pathing to a small number of fixed shapes probably wouldn't kill the game (with a little Moore's Law helping us out), but flexible creatures could be unworkable unless there is a breakthrough in the mathematics of pathing algorithms.

Personally I'm fine with a dragon fixed at, say, 3x5 tiles so long as it's able to rip a hole big enough for it to enter (with the speed of destruction taking into account the materials and quality of construction).

Edit: phone insists on incorrect autocorrects.

[evictedSaint]

Well, some flexibility in a multi-tile creatire is already shown in game.  Dwarves dragging entrails, pushing wheelbarrels, etc.  Snakes would not be hard to make flexible.

[Dirst]

Snakes might be a special case that could be allowed flexibility.  Set up a couple ballistae and you could start a game of Centipede.

[mister Zalli]

Well in the case of the snakes the head could do regular pathfinding and the rest of the body follows, like in the game snake.
As for larger rectangular wagon-like creatures they could follow a different map in their pathfinding, like what the DF shows you when you press D to show the areas accessible by wagons from your trade depot. This will be slower than other pathfinding, but it isn't an insurmountable problem and multi-tile monsters are rare.

[mndfreeze]

It would surely be neat to have size matter for more then just combat, i.e. can a dragon FIT through that door if it can't break it down for some reason (artifact, etc)

It would give a new way to stop mobs or make nifty traps