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[PTTG??]

Simple: have all shrubs that have been designated for harvesting also become designated as 5 traffic points higher than normal, so that given a choice, dwarves step around them. It's kind of frustrating to see a line shrubs in the middle of a forest be trampled down just because they are in the one, ant-like line the dwarves walk on.

Since this uses the normal traffic designations system, there should be no extra lag.

[Footkerchief]

Elegant, I like it.

[Grek]

Silk too.

[Warlord255]

For tower-caps and saplings on my doorstep, I manually set their tile as Restricted... but adding this (or some version) as a core pathing feature would make forests a tidbit more interesting.

[Tormy]

Yep, good idea. 

[Joseph Miles]

Maybe make it higher than 5, just in case you get a really badly organized map and that 5 wouldn't change the pathing. But, yeah, I like it.

[Footkerchief]

For tower-caps and saplings on my doorstep, I manually set their tile as Restricted... but adding this (or some version) as a core pathing feature would make forests a tidbit more interesting.

Hmm.  Automatically restricting saplings makes sense, but this suggestion wouldn't cover it, since you can't designate saplings for anything.  Maybe this could be implemented instead under Orders -- "Dwarves avoid trampling harvestables," or something?

[Dame de la Licorne]

Maybe this could be implemented instead under Orders -- "Dwarves avoid trampling harvestables," or something?

But saplings also aren't classified as harvestable, so the order should probably be "Dwarves avoid trampling shrubs/saplings", and have it toggle between this setting, no avoidance (maybe default?) and "Dwarves avoid trampling shrubs (or harvestables)".  Since right now tramping through fields doesn't seem to damage the crop yields, it may sound better to have the third toggle be shrubs, but if Toady ever changes the code so that field tramping does damage the crop yield, "harvestables" would be a better option for the third toggle.  Comments?

[Footkerchief]

^^^ Yeah, I meant "things that are harvestable or might be eventually," sorry.  You could break it down into narrower types of potentially harvestable things, I guess, but I'd be content with all-or-nothing.

[Footkerchief]

Bumping this thread because really it's such a great, simple idea.

[Sowelu]

It's at least a little complicated.  I think it'll cost two bits per tile to implement, or 415k of memory on a 6x6 map that's all dug out.  When a harvestable grows, you store its current pathfinding cost into two bits, and overwrite its value on the map with the shrubbery cost (if higher).  When the harvestable is removed (harvesting, death, etc), you restore the original values.  If the player designates a new path cost overtop of your shrubberies, just store that new value into the the tile's cost and into the 'backup', so it'll keep the new value when the shrubbery goes away.

You kinda have to do it that way.  Because if you didn't change the pathfinding cost, and instead checked to see "is there a shrubbery here" every step of pathing, you'd see slowdowns.  Pathing loops can be made -really- tight, and adding even a single extra check for each tile is something that you don't want.

And yeah, even deep underground needs to be checked for shrubberies, in case you found spores and have a tree farm somewhere!

[Footkerchief]

Aren't traffic weights already allocated in the fixed-size tile data though?  I could swear I'd seen a couple bits reserved for those on a memory hackers' chart.

[Sowelu]

Yeah--Right now there's two bits (or should only be two bits, at least) for traffic.  If you want your shrubs to -temporarily- change the traffic cost, you need two MORE bits to back up your pre-shrub values.

Otherwise, when you restrict the area around your carp-filled death pond to keep dwarves from going near, a shrubbery that grows in that area and then dies will reset that square to normal traffic.  And shrubs that grow on a primary, high-traffic footpath will reset their squares to normal too.

Remember, every optimization you can add saves time.  That's why there's a flag on every tile that says it's occupied or not, instead of having to run through the list of critters in that square--checking one flag instead of a bunch of critters is faster.  And if you back up old traffic values, you don't have to check ANY new flags.

[Mel_Vixen]

Well the knackpoint lies in the pathingalgorithm.

IIRC it checks the Pathingcosts for each tile(which already are part of the the Map so no new Bits) on every pathfinding you just have to tweak in an additional check if theres a shrub or Sappling which should be quit easely.

[Footkerchief]

Oh, I see your point.  You could do it with just one extra bit though -- a "trample-able thing in this tile" flag that tells the pathfinder to ignore the tile's own traffic weight and use a global value instead, or pick the higher of the two or something.  This would prevent you from doing something fancy like automatically assigning traffic weights that vary based on plant type, but that's not much of a problem.  Also, I think the tile structure will have some free bits anyway now that splatters are getting shifted to a dynamically allocated system.