I'm trying to get something like (the actual end result is larger, just putting enough to get the idea) this:
d
iii
diiid
iii
d
by using
iid
ii
d
and rotating/flipping this. To me, this just makes a lot more sense than to me than the example given in the quickfort manual, which uses
d
ii
dii
and rotates that, since with "my" version I can just set the cursor in the middle of the central staircase at the start. Instead of having to count out from the staircase every time I want to designate something, or marking a tile in one of the corners to be the "start tile" (with fixed location relative to the 3x3 central staircase) throughout all the z-levels in the embark.
I've figured out how to get this effect by using 4 separate commands and changing which corner it starts at in between (NW corner + no transform, NE rotcw, SE fliph flipv, SW rotccw), but it would be nicer to get 1 command to do the whole thing. The closest I've managed (with a command I didn't mark down at the time, and can't seem to find again) was the equivalent of
diiiid
iiii
dd
...which adds an extra tile of width.
so I'm starting to lose hope that quickfort even can do this sort of thing. Admittedly, the 1-tile wide overlap along the central axes every time does make the 3x3 staircase somewhat inefficient, and a 2x2 or 4x4 would be better in that sense, and probably easier to manage with quickfort as well. I could probably modify my design to have a 4x4 staircase fairly easily - modifying the rest of my fort for that, "neatly", might be another matter though. However, I'm still stumped on how to do the center-focused transforms, even if I did switch to an even-numbered central stair.
Searching this thread returned a couple of other queries from people also wanting to do center-focused rotations, but I didn't notice any solutions within a page or two of said posts.