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[Tamren]

Ah i guess i missed that. Thats great though, huge improvement  

[Felix the Cat]

quote:Originally posted by Fieari:
[QB]It's not impossible, it's just non-trivial, and potentially CPU sucking.  It requires an entirely separate connectivity map.  You also can't simply assume outdoor movement only.  And elephants certainly wouldn't be the only thing needing multiple tiles.  The Balrog, for instance, would need it, as would dragons, both of which DEFINITELY require pathfinding.

I acknowledged this in my post, which I assume you must have missed.

quote:"Giving chase" itself requires pathfinding.

The short answer is, "yes".

The long answer is, "sort of". A basic "dumb" chase procedure is something like this:
-Get current location of entity being chased.
-Find shortest straight-line path to entity being chased.
-Figure out which adjacent tile is closest to that path.
-If the tile is passable, move into it. If not, find the next closest adjacent tile.
-Repeat until some end condition is met (entity passes out of sight, chaser loses interest in chase, entity or chaser is killed).

NB. A check for "stuckness" goes in there somewhere with instructions on what to do in the event of becoming stuck.

This is quite different from intelligent pathfinding, i.e. "I want to get from this dining room to that magma forge, which way should I go?"

I already acknowledged that intelligent multi-tile entities require more work. I still suspect that the issue with multi-tile mobiles is a structural one rather than a computational one.

[FFT]

I have a question unrelated to the neverending tile size debate (and one probably only Toady can answer):

In the current (released) version, trees don't grow except for a specific amount of space east of the cave river (and all space west of it). Has this been considered for the new version?

[Capntastic]

Incursion, the new D&D roguelike has multitiled creatures.   I polymorphed into a dragon and took up (I think) a 3x3 area- and it looked dumb and was a hassle to control.  

I think that single tiles for everything works well.   I dunno about wagons being 3x3, but Dragons and Whales can stay a single tile.

[Grue]

There are also Evil Trees (or something like that), which are also 3x3.

[Tormy]

quote:Originally posted by Turgid Bolk:
<STRONG>Toady said the wagons can now adapt. He gave the example of sticking statues in their way, and they succesfully navigated around the statues. No more exploding wagons!

Does anyone have examples of an ascii game that has multi-tile creatures? It seems it would look pretty weird, but it would help to have a border around it to tell exactly where the "edges" are (as someone else suggested). Also, I wonder if it would be possible to have smaller than one tile images...for instance, have vermin not take up a whole tile, or show cabinets up against a wall. This gets in to the "just how wide is a tile, anyway?" argument, but we'll have to figure that out to decide how many tiles an elephant occupies, anyway.</STRONG>

1. Sooner or later the whole game can be turned into graphical via modding.
2. multi-tile creatures would be a nice addition imo.

[Toady One]

The way it decides how trees can grow has been changed completely, and it now just looks locally for root space (not that there are actual roots yet, though the game really needs roots).  I haven't gotten a chance to try an inside tree farm though -- I suspect there are some new issues with it since it would have to have an inside population where the mushrooms are coming from, which are linked to the cave rivers but might not be used outside the boundaries of the river.  Once you find the river, the spores or spawn or whatever the hell it was mushrooms use should probably be everywhere.

edit:  Spores work.  Ogg video from wikimedia.

[ September 04, 2007: Message edited by: Toady One ]

[DrJonez]

I'm all for multi-tile creatures. There's just something really underwhelming about coming up against your first dragon or hydra or whatever, and it looks like "D" and that's it. If something as mundane as a wagon has the effort put into it to make it bigger than one tile, than why can't the big, extra special creatures be given the same effort?

Besides, that'd also add more realism to the game. Things like dragons not fitting down 1 tile wide hallways, etc.

[Toady One]

It's not the same effort; it's a great deal more effort.  Just having a chase routine isn't sufficient -- if the multi-tile creature chases something and manages to get around a corner, it'll then be stuck or have some very rudimentary routines to try to get out, which would be anticlimactic.  I prefer the large creatures to have brains (or at least potential brains) than extra tiles.  The main issue is path finding and how it currently handles it via connected component numberings, which really only work perfectly for creatures that move like dwarves now.  Other creatures currently work mostly okay with them, but multi-tile creatures wouldn't work at all.  I don't think it would be impossible to change this, but I don't have and have not seen any feasible ideas for handling the issue.

[ September 04, 2007: Message edited by: Toady One ]

[flap]

I see a way (Hmm. Without seeing you actual code... That's quite presumptuous). But that would double the number of calculation for pathing. You have to do a tile connection map for the 1 tile big creatures (as it is done), plus an other one for the 4 tiles big creatures.

I suppose that before doing the connection map, you need to create a "passable tile" map

Here would what you are doing now with the 1 tile large creature.

code:

  
######     000000
#.....     011111
......     111111
...#..     111011
######     000000
# : Wall   0 : Not passable
. : Floor  1 : passable 

Here is what you would do for the 4 tile passable map.  A point is blocked if when the object is at this point any of the tile is on a wall. In that example, I have centered the object on the right lower tile.

code:

  
######     000000
#.....     000000
......     001111
...#..     111001
######     000000
# : Wall   0 : Not passable 
. : Floor  1 : passable 

Once you have got these 2 maps, you create 2 connection maps.

[ September 05, 2007: Message edited by: flap ]

[BDR]

I think one potential solution for multi-tile creatures (maybe not all, but some) would be to give them the power to smash walls in their way (perhaps causing them to slow down some).  That could make for both a "holy crap it's wrecking my fortress and hasn't even killed anyone" feel as well as a sense of its strength.

[TheSpaceMan]

i like the feeling of abstractnes when dealing with creatures in game. The problem is that this can spill out into how "but how many chairs can really fit on a tile, can a dwarf really pass them at all?" Is every tile a square meter then my fortress feel realy small... is it 10x10 meters, then my dwarves must be huge to have to crawl over each other when meeting in a small hallway. Now it just feels right things are there, and they work. Gives more room to the mind to run havok.

[Talion]

quote:Originally posted by flap:
I suppose that before doing the connection map, you need to create a "passable tile" map

code:

  
######     000000
#.....     011111
......     112222
...#..     222012
######     000000
# : Wall         1 : passable for size 1 creatures.
. : Floor        2 : passable for size 2 creatures (and below).
0 : Not passable

This would be make more sense rather than seperating things out, but I'm not sure how much of a solution this is.

[Tormy]

quote:Originally posted by Toady One:
<STRONG>It's not the same effort; it's a great deal more effort.  Just having a chase routine isn't sufficient -- if the multi-tile creature chases something and manages to get around a corner, it'll then be stuck or have some very rudimentary routines to try to get out, which would be anticlimactic.  I prefer the large creatures to have brains (or at least potential brains) than extra tiles.  The main issue is path finding and how it currently handles it via connected component numberings, which really only work perfectly for creatures that move like dwarves now.  Other creatures currently work mostly okay with them, but multi-tile creatures wouldn't work at all.  I don't think it would be impossible to change this, but I don't have and have not seen any feasible ideas for handling the issue.

[ September 04, 2007: Message edited by: Toady One ]</STRONG>

Damn....it would be cool to have mult-tile creatures.  

[schm0]

I would think that a little imagination is necessary when we think about tiles and what is contained within them. We all know how unrealistic it is that a single tile can hold an entire herd of captured elephants within a cage, or that same tile could be occupied by a single plump helmet spawn. Use your imagination!  

The visual representations you see on the screen merely represent the actual object(s) it contains, not their physical size. There are countless other examples of size variance between different objects in the game, but all of them have to be visually represented in some manner.

Eventually, I think our desire for larger or smaller objects will be satisfied when tilesets reach the point where we can implement actual graphical representations greater than 16x16 pixels and are able to use more than the typical color palette we have to work with. In other words, when the GUI goes beyond ASCII, (far, far in the future,) this game will have small little graphical representations of seeds, butterflies, birds, etc. as well as larger representations for whales, elephants, giants and trolls. For now, I think we should be happy with our 'E's and 'W's and '.'s