I think I've had dwarves try to path (and walk) through deep water before via ramps. I'm not sure, though; can anyone else say?
No. They pathfind over ramps which are water-filled though. Dwarf then freaks out.
Toady can fix this by not allowing water to seep into a ramp. Or maybe something like below:
W = water ; w =water(open space) ; R = ramp ; r = ramp(open space); L = wall ; G = ground
top-down Zlvl1:
wGL
wrL
wGL
top-down Zlvl0:
WLL
WRL
WLL
on Zlvl0, the terrain of the WR could look like this:
W R
w w
w w
w w
w r
w r
w r
w r
W has 7 units of water(is full and dangerous), while the Ramp has 4 units of ramp, and 3 units of water(full and safe).
If the ramp construction would half-occupy a square like this, then dwarves could wade through it without fear of drowning.
Heck, brooks could be made to work proper, even.
I realize that adding individual 'ramp items' like this would seriously bog down gameplay, but if we made them a sort of 'half-filled' square and hardcoded ramps and brookbeds like this then it could be pulled off i think. One could ascend and descend by using these ramps/brookbeds on top of a 'full' square like normal.
it would look something like this ;
ramp into water:
W R L
w w |
w w |
w _w____|
w |
w |
w |
w |
Or:
one-tile wide brook(B):
L B L
| w |
| w |
|___w____|
>FILLED<
>FILLED<
>FILLED<
>FILLED<
It's a hassle to keep track of dwarves running up and down z-levels, so i added that as a suggestion! Toady, you can maybe use the code for displaying trees as blocks, and display dwarves as maybe rocks of the corresponding colour!
It would make wading through the brook pretty unintuitive otherwise!