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[Rawl]

I almost want to apologize for this suggestion beforehand for how much processor it would inevitably kill (or if such an idea was mentioned in a previous thread, I looked I promise!)

So here we go: We know some people look at desert fortresses as a huge anomaly, being able to dig into the sand without it collapsing. So here is what i had in mind: Sand acts like water. Slower albeit, but still like water.

when you dig into sand there should be a period of time where the sand wants to fill the void by slowly pouring in. This action could take several dwarf days to fill in 1 tile promoting the dwarves to build walls around the current level and making sure that any levels above are made out of a more solid material.

If you were to say, dig a staircase down through 6 levels of sand all the layers would want to fill in the lower levels and they would fill this area much more quickly and deadlier than say a 2 level deep staircase. the poor dwarf would sit there suffocating unless someone comes and digs him out. This of course could put the rescuer at risk.

This can also be applied to snowy areas to add a little more flavor to it. Trying to wade through areas of "thick" snow, about 3-5 fullness on the fluid scale, would greatly slow down a dwarf, if say an avalanche or blizzard type event would happen that would quickly bury the dwarf, he could run the risk of suffocation being burried under the crushing weight of the snow. Snow obviously would have a much more static movement than that of sand Perhaps being limited more by a regions wind speeds as opposed to current fluid dynamics.

Fullness of this Solid-Fluids could also give rise to such areas as dunes, or snow banks. a full area (7/7) would be treated as a full wall tile, which one could walk across. Tiles that are half full or mostly full (3or4/7-6/7) could be traversed much like ramps would, while finally near empty tiles would always be waded through slowing down the dwarf.

These areas of course could be mined (shoveled) as not to hinder movement. They could also use wind dynamics to determine how the sand dunes and snow drifts form. When you reach a map there could be set heights of these features and wind would push these into higher areas, and they would tumble down to the lower areas. Yeah I know I can't really think of a good way of describing this action, but keep in mind also that this should happen at a MUCH slower rate than water, true changes taking place over the course of SEASONS as opposed to seconds... unless of course weather hits...

This could raise small disastorous events akin to a siege, but against mother nature herself... Imagine getting a warning similar to a siege... A sandstorm is comming!... Beware the Blizzard!... In which the shifting of these surfaces can happen fast and deadly, What was a safe tile a moment ago is now a suffacating tomb. The player might not even be able to see under the blowing detritus until the storm settles. If you see one of these warnings you would have about a week to make sure everyone is inside and the doors/hatches are locked lest any flying sand and snow begins to pour into the fort.

Whew it was a long one! I just think that something like this could definitely spice things up for the harsher regions. Nothing necessary, but most definitely "fun."

additional note: the "gather sand" job would NOT remove any sand from the pile. Also the sand effects would be for regions recognized by the game as Desert or Badlands and the like, and would NOT effect say river sand or sand patches in Forests and fields.

[Heron TSG]

Maybe, as sand would be a 'fluid', by dropping tons of it into magma, you produce green glass chunks, sort of the way water makes obsidian.

[Pilsu]

Dwarf days are more like minutes. The clock would have to be reworked or the blizzards would arrive so quickly dwarves would probably never make it inside and end before you know it

[Rawl]

Perhaps dwarf days are too small to use, the general idea would be dwarves close to the entrance would surivive, those farther out should survive, but if say... The entrance is on one side of a standard region (the one provided without any modifications to size the one Toady has provided) and the dwarf is on the opposite side, and lets say it's a flat plane, HIS chances of survival might look grim.

You could always add some factors in, such as stamina (being able to not give in to the situation, breathing shallowly, etc), does the dwarf have a pick? maybe he could free himself from certain layers, a change from 0/7 to say 6/7 if he was a fairly trained miner, or perhaps providing himself with enough survival time that other dwarves could come to the rescue. That one ex-soldier with one arm, one leg, no beard and blind in one eye? Results look grim.

[Pilsu]

You're not gonna actually drown in snow you know, it doesn't build up that fast. You die of exposure because you can't see where you're going and wading through the snow slows you down

I imagine choking to death is the main problem with sand storms though

[Rawl]

snow danger would be more related to mountains meet avalanche situation, but considering it IS dwarf fortress and decorative pond fish ARE one of the most fearsome creatures to behold, it would take a dwarf to let himself be buried in snow. The "drowning" in snow was more of my idea of the "nature of the beast" on how something like this would end up being after programing, but the idea of having to clear snow away so that traders could get around or to allow for quicker military movements outside (what are your dwarves doing above ground anyway?) does sound more realistic and just dwarfy enough to fit, plus it gives my legendary miner something to do that would put his skills to good use. (snow wouldn't leave any usable blocks behind, not being ice and all.

[winner]

I made a very simple sand dune simulator that runs from the terminal it's very fun to watch and sand dunes might not add all that much lag.  Because of an artifact of the code the dunes do not like to get near a height of 9.

basically my code goes like this.
h= your height.
the chance of one unit of sand being blown away from you is 1/h
if you get to a height of 9 or greater, one unit of your sand is added to every square touching you.

code

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

#include <ctime>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <curses.h>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
/***************************/
const int Y=24;
const int X=80;

int Sand[Y][X];
int sand[Y][X];
bool wall[Y][X];
char view[Y][X];
/***************************/
void sleep();
void print();
void init();
void wind();
void flow(int y, int x, int a, int b);
/***************************/
int main()
{
WINDOW *window;
window = initscr(); // set up the curses window
nodelay(window,1); // don't wait for user input
srand48(time(NULL)); // initializes the random number generator
clear(); // clear the window
noecho(); // don't show typed characters on the screen
init();
while(1)
{
print();
wind();
sleep(); // wait a bit
}
refresh();
echo(); // turn echoing back on before exiting
endwin(); // end curses control of the window
}
/***************************/
void init()
{
for(int y=0; y<Y; y++)
{
for(int x=0; x<X; x++)
{
view[y][x]='#';
Sand[y][x]+= rand()%3;
wall[y][x]=0;
// if(x>X/2 && y%2)
// wall[y][x]=1;
}
}
}
/***************************/
void print()
{
for(int y=0; y<Y; y++)
{
for(int x=0; x<X; x++)
{
if(Sand[y][x]>8 )
view[y][x]='^';
else if(Sand[y][x]>4)
view[y][x]='~';
else if(Sand[y][x]>1)
view[y][x]=',';
else if(Sand[y][x]>0)
view[y][x]='.';
else
view[y][x]=' ';
if(wall[y][x]==1)
view[y][x]='#';
}
}
clear();
for(int y=0; y<Y; y++)
{
for(int x=0; x<X; x++)
{
mvaddch(y, x, view[y][x]);
}
}
refresh(); // refresh the screen
}
/***************************/
void sleep()
{ // function that waits a little while, keeps the game slow
clock_t goal = 7000 + clock();
while (goal > clock());
}
/***************************/
void wind()
{
for(int y=0; y<Y; y++)
{
for(int x=0; x<X; x++)
{
sand[y][x]=Sand[y][x];
}
}
for(int y=0; y<Y; y++)
{
for(int x=0; x<X; x++)
{
if(!wall[y][x])
{
for(int a=(y+Y-1)%Y; a!=(y+2)%Y; a=(a+1)%Y)
{
for(int b=(x+X-1)%X; b!=(x+2)%X; b=(b+1)%X)
{
flow(y, x, a, b); //makes the sand fall over if it piles too high
}
}
int temp = Sand[y][x];
if(temp!=0 && rand()%temp==0 && !wall[y][(x+1)%X]) //the bigger teh pile the less likely it is to blow along
{
sand[y][(x+1)%X]++;
sand[y][x]--;
}
}
}
}
for(int y=0; y<Y; y++)
{
for(int x=0; x<X; x++)
{
Sand[y][x] = sand[y][x];
}
}
}
/***************************/
void flow(int y, int x, int a, int b)
{
int temp=Sand[y][x]-Sand[a][b];
if(temp/10 > 0 && !wall[a][b]) //there are 9 squares reachable in one move.
{
sand[y][x]--;
sand[a][b]++;
}
}


[Starver]

If you have fluid(-like) sand and snow then I think you should also get path-weathering.  Not just the "makes grass go brown/back to soil and destroys growing sapplings) but digging out (should 7ths or 8ths of landscape ever be finely removable, as opposed to entire tile-heights) a little bit of frequently walked routes to create sunken lanes through raised bankings (where not similarly disturbed by whatever transitory meeting and joining paths there may be).


Also, I saw in a magazine recently (possibly one of the Linux ones, here in the UK.  Linux User & Developer, Linux Format or the third one I normally glance at whose name escapes me) something about modelling sand (for footprints, etc).  Doesn't quite have a relevence to the above suggestion, but that (and the snow that isn't falling too much outside, at the moment, unlike in the rest of the country according to the radio) piqued a sense of synchronicity in my mind.

[Niveras]

"Complete" list of intended goals.

# Bloat325, ADDITIONAL LIQUID TYPES, (Future): Candidates for new flowing "liquids" include sand, oil, mud, blood of various sorts, slime, farm products like grain and beer for the beer fountain. Only a limited number of materials from plant raws like beer would be able to be supported as a map flow at a given time.

Presumably the ability for sand to act as a fluid can be easily extended to include snow, particularly once:
# Bloat286, RAIN POOLING, (Future): Rain should have a chance to collect in certain areas.
Goes in.

[Footkerchief]

^^^ Yeah, and additionally:

# Bloat292, DEEP AND PERSISTENT SNOW, (Future): Deep snow that you have to trudge through or that you can sink down into, depending on the regional snowfall number. Snow that lasts for a while at temperatures above freezing, based on amonut and temperature differential.

Rainseeker:   So I think this is one of the ways I have the most fun in this game is making things. I had a lot of fun particularly when I went to a desert and found a magma pool and decided to make glass, just tons and tons of glass, I had like ten glass refineries - or kilns I guess - just made tons of it, and then started building a glass fortress, because it's an unlimited resource. Is that ever a plan of yours, to make a sand pile limited?

Toady:   There's this notion of sand as a fluid I think, that's kind of intriguing. Like if you have a bunch of sand leaning up against a rock wall and you remove the rock wall, the sand doesn't retain its shape, it'll just flow into the cavern. So it would be really cool if it could be made into a fluid like that, that behaves kind of like lava does now; because lava makes more slopes, it doesn't worry about fluid pressure and all that kind of thing. And it would be cool if the sand could move like that, but at the same time you could still walk or even build on it, or whatever you need to do. And in that way it would become a limited resource because when you scoop up some it would just remove a unit of sand from the square. Snow has a similar thing. Right now though it depends not just on the fluid rewrite - which is going to allow us to support more fluid types at once - but also the notion that this is a very special fluid that can be walked on and all that. So you'd be pathfinding over it, and at the same time it would be able to flow. It's one of those things like; is this an insurmountable problem? It might be, it might be one of those things that's very very difficult to do.

Rainseeker:   Well [it] would make it actually very difficult to build; especially if someone decided to build on a sand dune.

Toady:   That should be hard, but you could still pitch a tent there or something; and then that tent should just fall over if you drain the sand into a giant sinkhole or something.

Rainseeker:   Well I'm thinking people build pillars to support things, so if someone built a pillar on a sand dune which then shifted that thing should fall over and that should be really interesting to do.

Toady:   That's one of those things that's very difficult but you'd ideally want sand to have those additional properties.

[Silverionmox]

To cut down on framerate horror, wet sand could still be treated as soil for the purpose of deciding whether to apply the cave-in system or the fluid system. Sand sculptures are kept wet to keep their shapes after all.

[Saronsen]

Running at a framerate of a constant 90-100 FPS, I can confidently say that a Dwarf Day is exactly 35 of our seconds.

For those of you who weren't sure.

[Craftling]

# Bloat286, RAIN POOLING, (Future): Rain should have a chance to collect in certain areas.

That one really needs to be done...

[Starver]

[...]
Rainseeker:   Well [it] would make it actually very difficult to build; especially if someone decided to build on a sand dune.

Toady:   That should be hard, but you could still pitch a tent there or something; and then that tent should just fall over if you drain the sand into a giant sinkhole or something.

Rainseeker:   Well I'm thinking people build pillars to support things, so if someone built a pillar on a sand dune which then shifted that thing should fall over and that should be really interesting to do.
[...]

Imagine a number of pillars built on sand (say a 3x3 grid), then built on top of by a structure in a way that does not stress beyond (whatever, if any) mechanical stress distance is implemented for a cavern roof at this point in time of DF's development.  Then start draining the sand away (by sinkhole or 'mining' it away at a corner).  At some point there's either going to be a collapse, or the structure would have to sink down as the top of the 'fluid' sand sinks down.  (If we ever get to the stage of sloping 'floors', we could get structure-tilt.  Which might be especially fun with tall towers built on such unstable ground, and need emergency underpinning to prevent their total collapse/sideways toppling.)

The prospective sand-dune builder would be best advised to sink their piles into the ground[1] to get a firm foundation, perhaps, in a Manhattenesque manner.

[1] I recall an old thread suggesting "pushing" machines that could sink piles downards (or drive wall-like structures sideways) natural rock/soil.  This would be an additional use for them.

[Saronsen]

I'm actually sort of against sand dunes collapsing and shifting. I like building my Fortresses in the desert a lot, and with the in-game music I have, it sort of suits the sandy locale. I also like imagining the fine sand making the beginnings of my Fortress less miserable for the dwarves, since they're sleeping on something a bit softer than rock, and not quite as dirty either. Sand is also a lot better at keeping interior areas cooler than dirt, so the Deserts heat would be a thing of the past some distance into the main hall.

I also like being able to farm when the rest of the map is rock, as most treeless locales are. Extra challenge for the lack of trees, and for being a Terrifying area.