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[TomTheHand]

quote:Originally posted by Toady One:
<STRONG>Just to clarify, the main issue with rewalling is that at least some of the siegers need to be able to circumvent it or the game will seem more broken with it than it does without it.  Rewalling itself isn't that difficult.</STRONG>

I think that if you're the kind of person who'll exploit rewalling by simply walling the entrance of the fortress up, you're the kind of person who's already got a flood-the-world-with-magma lever.

[NekoChris]

quote: Originally posted by Toady One:
Just to clarify, the main issue with rewalling is that at least some of the siegers need to be able to circumvent it or the game will seem more broken with it than it does without it. Rewalling itself isn't that difficult

I don't know how hard it would be but you could give the sigers the ability to mine, they could check wall depth and if they find a spot with say 3-4 or less thickness then off to work they go. It could be slower than dwarf digging because, they're not dwarves, so give you time to send a task force to stop them. Until the Elite Digger shows up later and tears down those wall defenses causing cave ins and oh lawdy.

[LSTAR]

Personally, I don't see rewalling as an exploit. I can totally see a group of dwarves just walling the world away ^^. Of course you'd have to stop immigration after a couple of seasons (once word reaches Civilization that your fort has gone hermit) and possibly increase the rate at which dwarves get that cave adaption thing.

[Koji]

How about making a cement or plaster workshop, then allowing you to build wall bits from their and place them like furniture. They are for all intents and purposes walls, but monsters can break through them if they have the building destroyer trait.

[Grek]

So floodgates basicly.

[TomTheHand]

quote:Originally posted by Grek:
<STRONG>So floodgates basicly.</STRONG>

Except capable of supporting ceilings, and not leaving behind permanent channels when they're destroyed.  So more like walls, and not so much like floodgates.

[Asehujiko]

but a fortress completely sealed off from the world would cause everything inside it to suffocate

theres your anti exploit feature

[TomTheHand]

quote:Originally posted by Asehujiko:
<STRONG>but a fortress completely sealed off from the world would cause everything inside it to suffocate

theres your anti exploit feature</STRONG>

Right, the mountain is an airtight structure, in which nothing can survive before you cut into it.  Not even a cave fish or a rat man could breathe in such an environment.  Oh, wait...

[Capntastic]

You guys forget that there's a river flowing through the mountain, as well as a big chasm and whatnot.

It's certainly not airtight in every spot.

[TomTheHand]

Yes, that's sort of the point I was trying to make: the mountain is plainly not airtight, even if there are no dwarf-sized hallways leading outside.

[Eiba]

Here's a question that actually pertains to the near future of the fortress. In regards to this:

quote:The main thing remaining with the basic rewrite is the innards of the mountain

What, exactly, is the plan?
I am incredibly curious because, unlike rewalling and such, it might have a very large affect on gameplay...
So if it's not to spoilerish, what do you aim for the innards of the mountain look like?

Or does this just mean you're recoding the traditional river-chasm-magma to randomly twist more, as the cliff face now does?

[Aquillion]

quote:Originally posted by TomTheHand:
<STRONG>Yes, that's sort of the point I was trying to make: the mountain is plainly not airtight, even if there are no dwarf-sized hallways leading outside.</STRONG>

It might not be totally airtight, but I think it makes sense for the dwarves to suffocate if they are trapped in a small area by a cave-in, just like a miner in the real world.  There's probably air coming in via the chasm and river somewhere (since there are large creatures in them), but with no access to either of those, even small cracks and such aren't going to give enough air to support dwarf-sized life.

[Toady One]

There isn't an exact plan.  I'm just going to have fun with it for a while.  The current notion of the end game is gone, as are the three inside 'rivers' in order.  With the ability to move the world around seamlessly, there has to be more connectivity between map features, so the vertical striping is out.  It will have an enormous effect on play, especially if the river isn't a guarantee (it won't be unless the mountain is ringed just inside with a circular river, which seems quite odd).  Depending on how far I get with it, the first few releases might be inferior to the current setup.  That's fine with me -- the freedom I'm building in now will make it much, much better in the future.  I look forward to doing lakes and mushroom jungles and horrible horrible environments for horrible horrible bad creatures.  

Another casualty of this rewrite (today actually) was save compatibility.  I always try my best to let the worlds ride along between the versions, and have been able to do it up until now, but this was just too much.  I was looking at weeks just to get the old save maps in line with the new ones (imagine approaching an old dwarf map from the right or top in adventure mode for example, especially if that fortress were actually on an east facing cliff, and keeping in mind that none of the map features like the cave river would even be recognized as such any more).  With things in basic development as they are, this was bound to happen eventually, and all I can say is that I'll try to minimize how often I have to do it.  It sure felt great stripping out all that code though!  It gets very convoluted and nasty.  The save files have been through 180 versions (many of those internally)...  loading the oldest saves took a long time due to how much fiddling it had to do, then fiddling on top of the fiddling.

We'd thought a bit about suffocation in tight spaces, but it was one of those things that's easy to disregard, since it's a hard problem.  I guess it could take the map components, as they are indexed, and then using their sizes track some kind of total air staleness in each one, with breathing creatures affecting that number based on their size and the volume of the space, but each addition like this saps the CPU.

[Aquillion]

Hmm...  it might not be worth it, but you could fake it with some sort of invisible 'suffocation flood' that spreads from a cave in or rewalling (when enabled), for a short distance.  If it manages to fill an area, that area is marked as airless, and creatures there begin to suffocate until one of the adjacent walls is broken open.

If an area is too large for the limited suffocation flood to fill, it's assumed to have enough air to make suffocation a non-issue.

It's sort of a cludge, but it'll make suffocation generally behave the way players would expect it to behave, without a ton of processing.  Still not sure if it's worth it, though, with so many more interesting things to add.

[Nephilim]

About the possible exploiting of rewalling... how about this:

Make is so that 'fake' walls act like normal walls in all ways, except one; siegers can recognise fake walls and attack them if they block their way. This way you can use fake walls for any purpose you might think of, except blocking yourself off from siegers. At best it would be a way of slowing them down.

I don't know if that's hard to make, but if it's not too hard I imagine this would be a solution to the problem...