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[JT]

quote:Originally posted by Tamren:
<STRONG>From what toady said a single square can hold pretty much an unlimited amount of creatures are long as only one of them is standing up.</STRONG>

That was mostly tongue-in-cheek.  The fact that other people can infinitely pile on top of one another is just the fact that the engine doesn't try to enforce strict stacking limits. =)

The basic idea is that a tile is enough room for a single person to stand up and no more.  Someone can press themselves flat against a wall or crouch down and the other could scramble past or over top.

Based on that scale alone, I've reckoned 1 metre squared by 2 or 3 metres high.  The other major rule is that beings don't overlap other tiles (for instance, a medieval human woman might be around 1.5 metres tall (around 5'0") but still wouldn't occupy any more than one 1-metre-square tile at a time).  You can fill that part in with your imagination for now.

[Veroule]

I am actually fine with the metal loss as it stands.  Some limits have to be placed to keep greedy players, like me, from having infinite stuff that we can't figure out what to do with.

The reality of melting down an item is actually much the same.  If the temperature is too hot it causes vaporizing of the metals.  Too cold and excessive oxidation will occur.  There could be some tweak in there about how skilled the dwarf doing the melting is, I would think a very highly skilled smelter should be able to get 99% of an item back as bars.

Wood, once cut up doesn't quite go back together as a single piece.  I would like to see the ability to rip apart stuff and reuse it, but wood really does grow on trees.  Most of the time we never actually run out, we just have to wait for it...a little bit.

If you pick a glacier that is your own choice, and I don't want to hear about it.

[slMagnvox]

If I took a pick axe and chipped away a 1x1x3 meter hole in the wall, I would be left with 1x1x3 = 3 cubic meters of rock.  A little less allowing some to evaporate as dust.

DF already abstracts digging through solid rock and I think it is in all of our best interest to leave it be and not ask too many questions about how much rock should be produced and where should it go.  Because matter cannot be created, destroyed, etc..  Leave it abstract and lets not have to haul out three loads of rubble for every one tile we excavate.

[Tamren]

easy solution then, this version is a bit rough and could use refining:

lets say for every square of rock you knock out, you are left with rubble.

Since dealing with all that rubble would be frustrating beyond measure we will not have to deal with it directly. Instead you designate a spot to pile all that waste rock outside your fortress. It is assumed that the dwarves take all the rubble and shuffle it outside but no hauling is actually done.

So if i wanted the stone intact i could knock out a tile carefully, get a boulder and or some chunks. The higher the skill of the miner, the more intact usable stone will be excavated.

The boulder is big enough for any project we might have, later on with higher skill you could extract 2 boulders worth of stone from each tile. A "boulder" is about the same size as a dwarf curled into a ball, so it is man portable and you can carve a decently sized block out of it. The chunks have other uses or can be saved as a valuable material like limestone flux.

If you simply want to clear out the area your miners will break up the stone without bothering to preserve any of it.

The rubble produced is simply heaped into a pile somewhere out of the way. You can use this rubble for various things:
1. Terrain modifying, gravel or jagged rock fields ect.
2. Increasing traction in slick areas such as a riverbank or an area that gets very bloody (traps).
3. Used to fill in walls, create mounts and other such fortifications.

And so on, to simply get rid of it, you can make smaller piles all over the vicinity. Once this is done, the dwarves can be ordered to simply scatter the stone all over the area. You could also dump the stone off a convenient cliff i guess, or into the ocean.

SO how does that sound? If you do not want a crapton of stone boulders or chunks you do not have to deal with them at all. The stone just gets moved outside.

If you DO want to recover usable stone, you can select where and when. You can also control the type recovered, if you just want boulders any waste stone will be broken up and added to the rubble pile.

[slMagnvox]

All I am saying is that, realistically, if I dug a 10,000 cubic meter cavern inside, I must have a ~10,000 cubic meter rockpile outside.  Digging abstracts both cutting rock and clearing the rubble.  Miners currently don't really dig through rock, they vaporize rock.

And I am all for that.

Considering the immense volume of stone we've excavated, you could imagine every thing inside and outside your fortress already covered in gravel.  Any job that might hypothetically require gravel (Make Bag of Quik-Crete) could be happily abstracted as gravel should be as infinitely available as sand is.  If you really want, you can make some Peasant go and gather it up in a bag before we can use it.

Using terrain as siege defense is more intriguing.  Imagine a gravel pit you've channeled shallow floodwater underneath.  If you want tank traps, a grid of Statues works essentially the same.  Since terrain has currently zero effect on movement speed, I imagine Toady will get around to all this kind of stuff when that gets addressed.  And exciting things will start happening like dwarves slipping on mud and drowning in a murky turtle pond.  Heh.

[Tamren]

Still... like you said imagine the possibilities >

Landslide trap anyone?  

Im sure statues would be changed in the future. A tank trap is designed to be a solid barrier, a statue is well... decoration. Of course there is no point unless toady programs in multi tile creatures.

But anyway, assuming the enemy will have to break up or carry away the obstable, a pile of stone blocks is going to be harder to move or destroy than a single stone statue, considering the statue is small enough to be dwarf portable and most animals do not have hands. Besides you can always mortar the blocks together  .