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[Toady One]

Yeah, I had fun walking around a cliff as an adventurer.  Walking and walking, no adversaries, just walking, checking out the little ins and outs.  It could be a game.  Empty Cliff Explorer.  Or something.

[Mechanoid]

So, when do we get to climb up them and break bones /snap our necks when we fall down, anyways?

"CLIMB MY DWARVES, CLIMB"
*200 dwarves tumble down the hill*  

[JT]

"These [dwarves] do not so much as [climb] as they... plummet."

[Pnx]

What's wrong with plummeting?  

[Fieari]

I suppose hills could be displayed via use of gradients in the background color of tiles... but of course, that'd require altering the engine to allow more than 16 colors at a time.

[qwip]

I was naively assuming that the gradients could be indicated by putting a line between two tiles.
But now that I type it out, I'm guessing the engine probably can't handle the interstices. And instead of mapping 480x480, you're now trying to map 959x959, altho the extra 479x479 might only have 1 value. (Until you find more uses for displaying intersticial data!)

[Abyssal Squid]

I was figuring something like ⌂, ▲, and ^ for passable tiles, representing elevation 25%, 50%, and 75% of the way up to the next level, but that would be pretty ugly, and I say that as somebody who likes the .,` ground tiles.

[Sowelu]

I'm not sure if this is what Abyssal Squid was proposing...but possibly using the background tiles to show what elevation something is, relative to -you- specifically?  That could still work with .,` by having , mean "at your level", . mean "below you", and ` mean "above you"...all of which are still considered to be the same level as you.  Dwarf mode would be unchanged, but it would mess with adventurer mode a little.  ^ for "more than a full level above you, and you couldn't go there if you were ajacent to it".

Probably a bad idea, but still.

[Pnx]

...Oh dear.

If trader pathfinding issues are this bad right now then they're going to be abysmal with the new maps.

[Stromko]

What about a change of brightness to indicate relative height? Or a change of color, say it'll vary between blue for low, yellow, then red for high-- but that can get confusing by overriding green grass, yellow desert, dark rock, and other differently colored backgrounds.

Just changing the brightness seems best to me, and of course there'll be more obvious delineations for the odd cliff-face and chasm.

For a minute there I imagined spawning multiple windows to show multiple 'levels' at once, for fortress mode particularly. But I don't really know how necessary it even is to have multiple floors in the fortress, right now it seems to me like the deeper you go into the mountain the deeper you're going beneath the earth. The tunnels =could= be looping back and under eachother and all, but it's just abstracted and random. Having the entire fortress on a single visible plane is just easier to manage.

[JT]

My personal belief on this silly contouring?  Not necessary.  Allow full steps between Z levels (as in five metres up or down) and just assume that all levels are homogenous.  People are free to infer whatever changes in elevation they want, so outdoor river or indoor river farming are both perfectly acceptable.

[flap]

A poor man's display would first be to see the temperature and/or elevation under the cursor when examinating or looking around.

[Chthon]

Wow, multi level fortresses allowing us to dig to the bottom of the chasm?  Awesomeness    However, it'd do away with chasming refuse really.

[Casey]

I never understood why you couldn't chuck stuff into either of the rivers.  The magma river would burn stuff up/melt stuff, the water river would carry stuff downstream and off the map.  Both would upset the inhabitants, similar to chasming stuff.

[Asehujiko]

if Z is implented, does that mean we get to build overlooks etc

code:

###=====###
##/     \##
##       ##
##_@X    ##
#####    ##
#####_gg_##
# rock
_ floor
/====\ masterwork ceiling fresco
X fortification
@ marksdwarf
g goblin