I don't even
use a mouse though. I've got a trackball sitting over to my left in case my mousekeys.xkb setup glitches out or something, but I'm not nearly ambidextrous enough to use it for gameplay of any sort, not to mention all of the functionality I would lose by replacing a whole numpad+adjacent keys+modifier keys with a frickin' pointer and four buttons? Nothxkbai and all.
It would irk the shit out of me to force a weird side-to-side swagger for any units walking north/south but not any other direction, though that does make me wonder about having a larger tilesheet to work with so you could include half tiles in different combinations or something?
│^__^│
│ ^
_|
_^ │
Comparitively though, a torus seems like the simplest method for df, if Toady was gonna embark on such a complete rewrite as that would require I think everyone would prefer it be one for multi-threading or something similar.
Note that I don't mean literally build and display the game world as a torus, just that it is an easy way to picture how the top~bottom+left~right linkages would work, never bothered me playing Asteroids or Star Control or Bravely Default or (keep inserting games like this) so why not if it meant no more isolated corners/edges being left out of the fun?
Like, we've got a damn mathematician here, various dfhack wizards, and not to tootle my own sad little horn but I enjoy reading dry mathematical papers and such myself... how did we miss this?
I've heard of toroidal worlds, but they're less pleasant to visualize while maintaining aspect ratio for squares. Notice the shrinking during the first fold and stretching during the other.
I'm pretty sure you get a surface that passes through itself if you don't.
Yeah but on the scale of even a 17x17 it's a simple enough solution to just have the map coordinates link up so the moving into the map blocks in the north and west edges of the {0,0} travel tile causes the appropriate map blocks along the south and/or east edges of the {815,815} travel tile to load on screen.
Oh, that's a good question:
myself I usually think of the 48x48 tile chunks as "embark tiles" due to their use on the embark screen/fort dimensions, and the 16x16 embark tile chunks as "world tiles" accordingly. Do you have a more official--if you will--terminology that you use, and are there different scales you use/think of the game world in terms of besides those?
Travel mode moves you basically on the embark tile scale and using dfhack in or near a site it's easy to see that altering the coordinates of your traveling army by x+1 moves you over 1 "site travel" step, but it takes an x/y change of 3 or more to move your spot on the wilderness travel map, so you could call 1 embark tile 3 travel tiles or 16 dwarf scale tiles I guess?