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[Abyssal Squid]

When rewalling comes in, it would be nice to be able to build a wall over channels to make them impassable to monsters while still allowing liquid to flow through.

Of course, swimming monsters would be able to swim right under them, so you'd need to add a grate of some material if you want to prevent frogmen, magma men, and the rest from sneaking up on your dwarves.  I'm not sure how to balance the strengths of the metal types though.  On the one hand, it shouldn't be possible to make an indestructable barrier out of, say, wood, or a single bar of copper.  On the other hand, allowing monsters to attack any sewer grates and the only difference between materials of different strengths is that one takes longer to take down makes them all nearly useless.

[Toady One]

This kind of thing almost forces the use of the Z coordinate though, since you have vertical path-finding issues.  Ideally, all channels should actually be dug out into a lower Z layer, like the first dungeon layers in adventure mode, and the cave river and lava river should actually occur at a lower Z level.  You could make deeper lakes to swim through that way and so on.  I've thought about doing this, but it would be a huge hassle and I'm not sure it needs changing yet.  However, it might be preferable to add a Z level rather than fussing with the aqueduct to make adueduct flows go over channel flows correctly.  If I add one Z level below the current Z level and it works only with channels/rivers, then the game could adjust and display them both, so you wouldn't have to worry about the <> flipping that you use in adventure mode.  In fact, you shouldn't be able to tell it's there at all in dwarf mode, except when broken features start to work.  There is the issue of having flows work in 3D, which is a problem.  Especially gasses like miasma, dust and so on -- if they become 3D instead of 2D, there could be some serious speed issues, though limiting it to 2 Z levels should mitigate a lot of that.

[Shingo]

Just a quick question, Toady: Is rewalling something that's going to happen in the near future?

[axus]

Sort of a related question, for flooding and other liquids, does each square have something like a height variable?  I thought Z-coordinate was for like different floors, height is more like feet.  Sea/River level could be fixed at 0, except during times when the river is flooding, and water can be added each tick to change it to 8 or something until flooding goes away.  Have each floody square adjust to the average of the neighboring passable squares, that should give good flood and drain effects.

And, uhh, wells would be fixed at 0 also, then you could use them as drains!

[bbb]

re-wall... can the new walls be destroyed by monsters? or are they like unmined rock faces?

[Shingo]

I'd assume (or really hope) that they'd act like unmined rock walls.

[20,000leeks]

Possibly rewalling could replace stone detailing. If you think about it, this would work like so: you to cut out the section of cavern you'd like, leaving rough edges (pickmarks, etc.). Then your mason constructs a certain amount of brick-like objects, or maybe just rock blocks. These are then used to construct a basic wall. Or, if you have more time on your hands, or want to make something extra-special for that whiny noble, you have a further step - the mason takes the stone blocks or bricks and improves them somehow (I'm not really sure what the word I'm looking for here is) by engraving them, or making them all the same size, or what have you.

This would mean that to make a mid-level wall in a 3x3 room, you'd do the following:

XXXXXXXXX
XXX...XXX
XX.....XX
XX.......     First mine out the section
XX.....XX
XXX...XXX
XXXXXXXXX
X=unmined rock
.=rough floor

XXXXXXXXX
XXXOOOXXX
XXO...OXX
XXO......     Then build up the walls
XXO...OXX
XXXOOOXXX
XXXXXXXXX
O=basic wall

Of course, for floors, you'd need to get some kind of block placement, perhaps building a channel and then putting a block in it... I don't know, something along those lines.

In regards to the sewers ideas, maybe, if it's at all possible to do, it could make both adventure and dwarf mode a lot more versatile. Instead of just building a well, maybe you could build a reservoir of sorts by making a 'pipe' to the underground river and leaving the pool open - requiring more work than a well, but allowing a larger number of dwarves to drink. Likewise, how cool would it be to infiltrate a kobold fortress by swimming through the sewer system?