@de5me7: Please explain how quicksand would effect things on top of it.
I can't speak for de5me7, but I personally think quicksand should just give you a movement penalty as you struggle to get back out - a bit like a swimmer stuck in water, making for shore. Unlike in the movies, where people just sink slowly into the sand until they drown, you don't sink all the way down into quicksand, but rather stop after sinking to a certain depth. So just have the character who's fallen in move slowly towards shore, and give him or her some mud smears (or quicksand smears, or whatever).
@Drutin: Explain how deep snow would react to movement across it and digging through it
Again, I'm speaking only for myself here. Personally I have to say it'd depend on how much depth you want to add to the "Winter Wonderland Arc".
In reality, freshly fallen snow is extremely powdery and can't be formed into anything, nor will it carry much weight. You'll sink a bit into it even with skis on. If lots of snow falls at the same time, this layer of powdery snow goes pretty deep. Either way, as it remains on the ground, it hardens and can be walked upon with much greater ease, and be formed into snowballs and whatnot and have tunnels dug through it. If there's lots of snow and really cold weather you end up with a crust atop the powdery snow. If a thin layer of snow melts and re-freezes, you get a sheet of ice covering the ground.
I think a good way to simplify snow would be to have it build up as a "solid liquid", as has been suggested by many, and then let the snow at the highest z-level have a powdery state, while snow that has snow on the z-level above it automatically turns solid (perhaps with a delay), like so:
(this pic has a crust over powdery snow, but you could just as well make it the other way around)
Moving across, and digging through the top layer would be very different from going through the lower layers - powdery snow would incur a stricter movement penalty than solid snow, but this penalty would be reduced by a smaller size, more legs, or gear such as snow shoes or skis. Powdery snow, when dug into, would act like a slow magma-like liquid and "run" into adjacent tiles, or cave-in if there was nothing in the z-level below it. Solid snow would be, well, solid, and you'd be able to dig through it just fine.
The real-life "system" for what snow becomes powdery and what snow becomes solid is fairly complicated, and I admit that I don't understand it fully, but something rudimentary like this would probably work just fine.
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Topic: Aboveground Diversity (Read 55787 times)