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[Sean Mirrsen]

Oh, it wasn't in this thread? For simplicity's sake, I'll re-outline it.

Make a 3x3 room. Dump weaponry along the walls. Make a grate in the center, put a glob or container with a poison in the middle. Dump magma onto the poison from above. Wait until the poison vapors settle onto everything. Retrieve weapons, don't forget to equip dwarves with gloves against contact poison.

About the same can be done with a piece of everburning lignite, but in that case the poison covering will likely be localized to just the tile above the fire.

@Askot: Don't quite get it.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

@Askot: Don't quite get it.

as  i understood, people were thinking that you said that toady had outlined a process to coat weapons with poison

[Footkerchief]

Make a 3x3 room. Dump weaponry along the walls. Make a grate in the center, put a glob or container with a poison in the middle. Dump magma onto the poison from above. Wait until the poison vapors settle onto everything. Retrieve weapons, don't forget to equip dwarves with gloves against contact poison.

Hmm... that depends on the gas condensing back into the liquid phase, though.  Condensation doesn't happen in the current version that I know of (probably because gas quantities are iffy, or because gas flows move around too fast to do temperature calculations, or because gas law calculations are themselves slow).  I doubt the next version has condensation either, but it might.  You could mod in a creature that constantly puffs out poisonous mist/dust, though, and that should get the weapons coated.  Or you could use a cave-in.

However, if you use a contact poison, then it'll poison the wielder too.  You could use an injected poison instead, but I'm not sure a stab with a coated weapon would trigger that (since it's mainly used for SPECIALATTACK_INJECT_EXTRACT).

as  i understood, people were thinking that you said that toady had outlined a process to coat weapons with poison

No, I don't think anyone was thinking that.

[Sean Mirrsen]

A contact poison will work, you just have to issue gloves against it. And I guess none but Toady currently know if injected poisons will work if they're a covering on the weapons. As for condensation.. well, I guess you could just use a lot of the stuff to generate enough material for covering.

[Footkerchief]

A contact poison will work, you just have to issue gloves against it.

It's iffy whether gloves will work:

If somebody is wrestling with such a creature, then aside from whatever contaminant are passed over initially, during the secretion phase, goo is added to the wrestler's wrestling parts respecting their inventory (so gloves should protect you from contact poison, for example, though I haven't tested that -- items don't have an "outside" so it could very well pass from your glove to your hand if you ever put the glove on later or something, I don't know).

As for condensation.. well, I guess you could just use a lot of the stuff to generate enough material for covering.

It's not an issue of quantity.  If condensation/deposition doesn't happen, then there's no way to get that gas onto the weapons, no matter how much gas you have.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Well, breath weapons work by vapor, so it does happen at least in some form. Worst case, you can use a non-inhaled non-contact poison and just station a few dwarves in the "steam room".

[arghy]

You could always mod your dwarves [poison immune].

[Footkerchief]

Well, breath weapons work by vapor, so it does happen at least in some form.

Not exactly... breath weapons can project a gas, a mist (liquid), or a dust (solid).  The mist and dust will definitely settle on surfaces.  It's uncertain whether the gas (which can directly trigger an inhalation syndrome) can condense onto surfaces, or turn into a mist/dust and then settle on surfaces.  The last couple times Toady mentioned condensation, it's been unclear whether it's been implemented:

Will gold gas condense into molten gold?  Or scatter into gold powder?

Gold gas, like the other game gases, currently disappears after a time.  It'd be possible after I get through with the blood stuff I'm working on today to have it coat a map square with a thin layer of gold dust, but I'm not going to be able to commit to anything.  There are also temperature tracking issues here, which I'm mostly going to avoid for now, probably, by omitting temperature for map spatter and just calling it material spatter without much reference to state.

So, now that we've got proper material temp handling, will we see steam come back as a possible weapon source?

It's different, certainly, but I'm not really sure.  The main problem in the new versions has always been the contact time and that the temperature difference between steam and flesh is very small (compared to say boiling metal).  If the gas can condense and settle as a hot contaminant you'd have the highest chance of getting something to happen I think, and those items are still outstanding on the list, I believe ("Handle a few material contaminant issues" has a temperature-related item anyway, and some quibbles with mat state).

The above is about free-floating gases, of course.  It's been confirmed that condensation will happen in the context of gaseous tissues.

[Martin]

I would just like to note that people are discussing the physical effects of condensates on living tissues via contact in a game that represents everything as little @'s and g's.

Carry on while I watch my little blue 3s slowly turn into 2s and my 2s into 1s and my 1s hopefully into brown .s or ideally ♣s.

[Sean Mirrsen]

So, what, if we make a creature with poisonous gas inside it (maybe as blood), and make it a common pet (like pet xenomorphs from Planet 51), then we could just drop the thing from an arbitrary height into the room, and the blood will spray in all directions, contaminating everything?

DF's detail level is staggering, I know. Soon we'll be able to zoom in on molecules, with atoms represented by little #'s, @'s, and *'s.

[Spiders Everywhere]

Ooh, I think I wanna mod my dwarfs to breathe booze breath, which they'd be immune to and would cause dizziness, impaired vision, nausea, vomiting, drowsiness, and unconsciousness. Now we just need "lowered social inhibitions" as a status effect...

[Footkerchief]

So, what, if we make a creature with poisonous gas inside it (maybe as blood), and make it a common pet (like pet xenomorphs from Planet 51), then we could just drop the thing from an arbitrary height into the room, and the blood will spray in all directions, contaminating everything?

Same (potential) problem as before.  Gaseous blood/tissue just becomes a material gas flow when it exits the creature (I think), so it still depends on whether Toady implemented condensation for gas flows.  However, there's an easy solution lurking in that situation -- just make the poisonous blood a liquid instead.  That'll splash nicely all over the place.

[quinnr]

So, what, if we make a creature with poisonous gas inside it (maybe as blood), and make it a common pet (like pet xenomorphs from Planet 51), then we could just drop the thing from an arbitrary height into the room, and the blood will spray in all directions, contaminating everything?

DF's detail level is staggering, I know. Soon we'll be able to zoom in on molecules, with atoms represented by little #'s, @'s, and *'s.

Both of these are probably the greatest reasons why I love DF.
Who else would think of dropping creatures 200FT just to poison a room.

[Shoku]

Ah yes, *that*.  I had imagined a re-writing of the current fluid dynamics.  A re-write of just how water works.  Something where hydraulics is actually represented accurately and also where it doesn't take a full year for water to flow through a channel from one side of the map to the other... oh well. 

I don't mean to imply that would be easy.  But man I would be thrilled if I heard Toady was teaming up with a fluid dynamics person to implement the ultimate hydraulics system.

Why would water without any pressure move fast?

But ya, if there was some way to get it to teleport at maybe 3 instead of 7 but stop once it was level-ish the slowly widening slopes of water wouldn't stick out as much.

Your hopes are a bit screwy though as hydraulics dudes probably don't have an especially good way of representing water in tiles like these.

That and Toady, being a mathematic professor, probably understand hydraulic sufficiently.  The only difficulty facing him is HOW to implement hydraulic into Dwarf Fortress without the FPS being shot to hell.
Remember, one of the most difficult problem for computer to simulate is fluid dynamics (if you try to do it realistically).
Though I think the current issue with Dwarf Fortress' fluid dynamic is that water seems to have a really high viscosity (which will result in water flowing really slow down a channel).  Of course, this may be an artifact of the fluid being represented in 1/7 chunks (low viscosity fluid will spread to a thin film rapidly, while tracking it in 1/7 chunk inherently slows it's rate of spread).

If you've watched the numbers dance very much it's clear that the units glide around on top of the next layer below them as a group but in a random sort of direction unless they hit a spot two digits lower at which case they fall down to that level and possibly continue the process. The teleport behavior requires actual pathing so it's slower but this non-wander behavior gives the kind of constant directional progress we want.

Now I don't know enough to say what issues there would be with checking if a body of water had more than two depths (such as 7/7 and 6/7) of water and bringing in a different behavior in that condition. It would need some special behavior for tiles on the edge of the map  different from what we see now lest it go all the time and overriding the flow directionality might give silly conditions like a horizontal stretch of a tunnel filling to 7/7 before hardly any movement in another direction took place.

[Phant]

This all seems a bit complicated for a way to poison weapons. I just figured you'd set up a workshop and apply poison the same way pretty much every people in history who are known to have used poisoned weapons did, its pretty much a bronze-age technology(The proto-greeks, ie the Acheans and Daniaans(sp?) were known to favor poisoned arrows) and even peoples who weren't even metalworking cultures have used poisons on missiles. A simple, by hand application to the pointy bit seems to be the generally used method.