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[Uthimienure]

Yeah, let's not do that. Otherwise all the pillars and room dividers on the level below would be showing up in the floor above, and possibly not aligning with the pillars and room dividers on the level above. Bleh.

I was thinking about this over night, and if your pillars and room dividers show up above isn't it because you didn't put floors on top of them?  And doesn't this mean there are actually gaps in your floor above?  It may look bleh, but the "bleh-ness" would serve a good purpose... telling you that floors still need to be built to cover the room dividers.

I'm going to stick by my original post, because this is the same problem we get when trying to make the top floor of a tower secure against intrusion by flooring over the tops of the outer walls. 

A good refresher:
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Tile

[Uthimienure]

[voliol]

Yeah, let's not do that. Otherwise all the pillars and room dividers on the level below would be showing up in the floor above, and possibly not aligning with the pillars and room dividers on the level above. Bleh.

I was thinking about this over night, and if your pillars and room dividers show up above isn't it because you didn't put floors on top of them?  And doesn't this mean there are actually gaps in your floor above?  It may look bleh, but the "bleh-ness" would serve a good purpose... telling you that floors still need to be built to cover the room dividers.

I'm going to stick by my original post, because this is the same problem we get when trying to make the top floor of a tower secure against intrusion by flooring over the tops of the outer walls. 

A good refresher:
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Tile

You suppose creatures path like this?^
The wiki is either lacking information in this topic, or I've lost by ability to read properly.

[PatrikLundell]

Walls have a walkable, built in floor on top of them, and that should be sufficient, in particular since building a floor on top would require you to remove it again if you want to build the wall higher. DF does have cases where there's no walkable floor on top, such as raised bridges and if you obsidianize magma with a stair on top and remove the stair. There's also a case involving the SMR, and there's also the case of built fortifications.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a bug that you'd need to build a floor on top of a floor to block diagonal access (and I don't know if you still do: Toady fixed the bug with diagonal access into stairs from below, but I don't know if that addressed the flier access from above [and I've never had that case happen to me, even before the bug fix, but many a critter from below]).

@voliol: The direction is the opposite to the one you describe, i.e. from above to below.

[Uthimienure]

Yeah, let's not do that. Otherwise all the pillars and room dividers on the level below would be showing up in the floor above, and possibly not aligning with the pillars and room dividers on the level above. Bleh.

I was thinking about this over night, and if your pillars and room dividers show up above isn't it because you didn't put floors on top of them?  And doesn't this mean there are actually gaps in your floor above?  It may look bleh, but the "bleh-ness" would serve a good purpose... telling you that floors still need to be built to cover the room dividers.

I'm going to stick by my original post, because this is the same problem we get when trying to make the top floor of a tower secure against intrusion by flooring over the tops of the outer walls. 

A good refresher:
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Tile

You suppose creatures path like this?^
The wiki is either lacking information in this topic, or I've lost by ability to read properly.

I don't know if creatures can path like that from my experience, but maybe I should stop believing so many people that post about making the top floor secure by building floors around the perimeter walls. They say that creatures can enter from the top down through the diagonal.  I've not seen it happen myself, so I can't really say if it's true. My forts need more violence so I can see for myself, I guess.

@PatrikLundell  Yes, I know it's walkable on top of the walls.  Is my drawing correct?  If it's not correct, then how can we build floors on top of walls?

[Manveru Taurënér]

I was thinking about this over night, and if your pillars and room dividers show up above isn't it because you didn't put floors on top of them?  And doesn't this mean there are actually gaps in your floor above?  It may look bleh, but the "bleh-ness" would serve a good purpose... telling you that floors still need to be built to cover the room dividers.

I'm going to stick by my original post, because this is the same problem we get when trying to make the top floor of a tower secure against intrusion by flooring over the tops of the outer walls. 

A good refresher:
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Tile


You suppose creatures path like this?^
The wiki is either lacking information in this topic, or I've lost by ability to read properly.

I don't know if creatures can path like that from my experience, but maybe I should stop believing so many people that post about making the top floor secure by building floors around the perimeter walls. They say that creatures can enter from the top down through the diagonal.  I've not seen it happen myself, so I can't really say if it's true. My forts need more violence so I can see for myself, I guess.

@PatrikLundell  Yes, I know it's walkable on top of the walls.  Is my drawing correct?  If it's not correct, then how can we build floors on top of walls?

A wall cannot exist like that, they always come with a floor included at the top of it. When building a floor construction on top you're basically just changing the material of the top layer rather than adding anything. Adding floors around the edges are more to prevent climbing than to fill in any kind of inherent gap.

[Starver]

As we're mentioning them, I always think of constructed fortifications as crenellations (properly built, for defence, it's not easy to walk atop the merlons (even Guelph-styled) and often made quite hard) with the crenels being the narrow unbuilt gaps (maybe/maybe not having a stepped up ledge within themself - but behaviour with liquids suggests not).

Carved fortifications are embrasures/arrow-slits of one kind or other, retaining most of the material of the original wall, thus does not deprecate the nature of the walltop (whatever is atop it at the time of carving).

Though we approximate by other methods, it would have been nice to have had carve-into-floor fortifications, i.e. "murder-holes" or possibly machicolations in certain circumstances.

- But this is now getting into gameplay rather than graphics territory. Beyond suggesting a viable graphical distinction on the type of fortification produced, maybe Ghibelline-styled constructed ones, etc. Unless the same sort of argument re: built-floor and walltop blending can be suggested (infilling gaps later in an overbuilt circumstance?).

[bloop_bleep]

Yeah, walls automatically add floors on the level above, and I don't think just visually, since the floor above is actually a construction that exists.

[Nelia Hawk]

i always hated it to build a building and then try to build the 2nd floor walls different to the 1st floor and had to remove floors? i dont remember exactly, but something about walls and floors and building a tower etc always annoyed the hell out of me...  maybe it was that i cant build walls on constructed floors?(think "works" with df hack stuff) and had to remove the floor and then build a wall...hmm

somebody probably knows what i mean XD

[bloop_bleep]

Yeah, you can't build walls on top of constructed floors that are not tops of walls.

[Uthimienure]

Right, you can build walls on top of walls.

You can not build walls on top of constructed floors, which encourages making each floor the same as the one below unless you like more hassle  .
You're right about having to remove the floors to build walls. This conflicts with claims that floors are automatically added to the tops of constructed walls.

By the way, the last picture you see above isn't how I drew it, the "AIR" part was modified by voliol to illustrate something else.
If I could find my kids legos (drat), it would make it a lot easier to visualize... bricks being walls and flats being floors.

[Nelia Hawk]

Right, you can build walls on top of walls.

This conflicts with claims that floors are automatically added to the tops of constructed walls.

i think this is true though. the z level above a build wall counts as floor... so i.e. you can build a chair on it or another wall.

maybe they should change how this wall/floor stuff work... and either make walls not count as floors the next z level (but guess gets a mess with pathing with how walls/floors work like in that picture) so you have to build ALL floors yourself.
or make it so you can construct stuff on self build floors (that probably less a hassle to "allow" in the game. i think df hack has something that "ignores constructions" or such... so you can build walls on buidl floros(i think). pretty sure i seen that in some pack)

[bloop_bleep]

Yeah, there is a floor there as an actual construction object in the game data that you can find, and it functions just like any other floor except for the purposes of building/removing constructions.

[Uthimienure]

One thing we can probably agree on is that there is something wonky about all this floor business, 
My mind is now open to whatever the truth of it all is. It would be cool if Tarn or Armok would crash the party here and set it straight!

bloop_bleep, could you help me find in the game data where the floor object is because that would clear things up for me. I'm too much of a novice with the data to know where to even begin looking.

{EDIT}  The more I look into this, the more I think I've been wrong. But there is still confusion. Sorry for taking this thread on a tangent.

[Starver]

If you've done a "proper roof" above a floorplan, you've probably covered everywhere (walltop and open space) with floor and/or bridge, except where you're providing inter-level access of course. And if you then decide to expand you'd obviously have to remove any floor that coincides with where you want to place a new wall[1], regardless of what it covers. With due diligence to avoid certain possible cave-in situations, of course, but that can be mitigated by being methodical.

If you're adding to a lower level before blanket-flooring it, then changing the floorplan is trivial. I sometimes reverse the rotational direction of a design, or even "inverse ziggurat" bits of it in the process, to increase usable space eith overhangs.

You really only need to know what you're doing in advance (ideally), in both cases, or if you're making it up as you go along there are plenty of clues along the way.  It's no more complicated than trying to plan a fully congruent repeat. Which is difficult, in itself, but only to normal "until you understand the game's little quirks" DF difficulty[3]. IMO.


How to make this better with the new tileset, I leave open to answering by those in the core UI redesign team. I'm not sure anyone else has enough knowledge to narrow down the options to what is caterable-for.


[1] The argument that this is necessary[2] is, I expect, more Toady/ThreeToe country as an annexe to the UI reorganisation project.

[2] Prime alternatives being 1) to allow wall-building on built floors, 2) "conversion" of the floor material into wall-form or 3) "recovery" of the floor material at the same time as; all of them with pluses and minuses to their operation, if enabled as an option atop the current working, or maybe how the current thing is totally retooled to become.

[3] Like it being best to place all corner-pillars first, then (planned) door-to-door flooring, then expand the floor and the corners in. At least the way I tend to do it. With a close eye on the natural LIFO job ordering when it comes to 'servicing' such construction jobs. In fact, I'll block-designate walls and/or floors then cancel some and block designate those spaces in again (repeating to further sub-selections as necessary) to force the jobs into the order I require. But that's a discussiin for another thread, on another sub-board, even if the rest of this post is not.