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The new channeling is covered in awesome sauce, the old channeling smelled real bad.

113 (19.3%)

The old channeling was the best, we don't need two ways to make ramps it is just silly.

245 (41.8%)

Old channeling was the best, new channeling is also the best.  Can't we all just get along?

132 (22.5%)

You people need to get on with your lives, it's not a big deal either way.

96 (16.4%)

Total Members Voted: 583

[Shades]

He shouldn't need to submerge himself to dig a ramp. He should need to do that to dig out the square completely. In that case, however, it's either so cold that the walls of the pit flash-freeze instead of the dwarf, or it's not that cold, and the dwarf could get out albeit with cold, wet pants.

Not sure if your saying what you think should happen or what you think does happen? If it's the former it would be a reasonable change I think, if its the latter then try it and watch your miner die

[Silverionmox]

Should, of course. It would solve the problem of freezing miners, while making more sense. Just like the new channels make more sense than the old channels where the dwarves wave their picks at a square, and then *POOF* it vaporizes. The old channel designation can come back to make designating easier, but as a combined designation of two jobs, ramp downward + remove ramp.
That still leaves the flickering ramp in fluids to annoy some people, but it suffices to make the Hide designation work on ramps to cure what ails them. (How did they get that last rock out of the channel, anyway? And doesn't it bug them that they can't also smooth that last square? Smoothing while lava is flowing on it is just as absurd as removing the ramp with lava flowing IMO.)

[Ilmoran]

Should, of course. It would solve the problem of freezing miners, while making more sense. Just like the new channels make more sense than the old channels where the dwarves wave their picks at a square, and then *POOF* it vaporizes. The old channel designation can come back to make designating easier, but as a combined designation of two jobs, ramp downward + remove ramp.
That still leaves the flickering ramp in fluids to annoy some people, but it suffices to make the Hide designation work on ramps to cure what ails them. (How did they get that last rock out of the channel, anyway? And doesn't it bug them that they can't also smooth that last square? Smoothing while lava is flowing on it is just as absurd as removing the ramp with lava flowing IMO.)

Or you can stop trying to half apply reality to actions in Dwarf Fortress.  It is not impossible to dig a hole out without ending up in the bottom of it.  Likewise, it is not impossible to dig out the hole before you breach the liquid.  You leave a braced retaining wall while you dig out the rest of the area (most people consider a tile to be, what, 10x10? You leave a foot or two of rock wall while you clear out the rest of it).  When you're done, remove the braces, and maybe give the retaining wall a good whack or two, and it should crumble as it loses integrity.  Now, unless you want to start demanding actions/designations for each of those steps, it should be abstracted out as part of the channeling command.

And hell, for smoothing walls once the magma flow starts, the wall should probably be smoothed by the magma.  But that aside, you don't see the unsmoothed floor tile once the magma is flowing, but you do see the ramp.

[Squirrelloid]

What was the cause of death, anyway?

Try channelling into an aquifer on a freezing map. Your dwarf ends up at the bottom of the ramp and dies instantly.

He shouldn't need to submerge himself to dig a ramp. He should need to do that to dig out the square completely. In that case, however, it's either so cold that the walls of the pit flash-freeze instead of the dwarf, or it's not that cold, and the dwarf could get out albeit with cold, wet pants.

How do people envision dwarves digging a ramp that breaches an adjacent liquid without having to enter the square?  I mean, its the exact same problem as breaching a liquid while digging a pit.  Its not like the ramp slopes towards the liquid, since the liquid is breached.

(The way you do both without getting soaked/burned is you brace the wall and remove the brace - letting pressure finish the breach.  But it is certainly required in both instances.)

[Silverionmox]

Then make it require braces. Just doing it with a pick is quite silly; breaks my suspension of disbelief. Breaching a body of liquid is not trivial, so it shouldn't be trivialized just like digging any old trench. The issue will be addressed again with "realistic mining" in any case.

[Shades]

Then make it require braces. Just doing it with a pick is quite silly; breaks my suspension of disbelief. Breaching a body of liquid is not trivial, so it shouldn't be trivialized just like digging any old trench. The issue will be addressed again with "realistic mining" in any case.

Lets face it doing any digging with just a pick is going to fail, at the very least you need something to remove all the broken rock / soil.
But that probably wouldn't be fun.

[Ilmoran]

Then make it require braces. Just doing it with a pick is quite silly; breaks my suspension of disbelief. Breaching a body of liquid is not trivial, so it shouldn't be trivialized just like digging any old trench. The issue will be addressed again with "realistic mining" in any case.

So you can't possibly imagine that as part of mining/channeling, your dwarves use braces, because you didn't tell them to?  How do you deal with the fact that 1 tree gives you a log that can be used to build a 10 foot section of wall?  That digging through soil leaves no dirt/clutter?  The fact that your dawrves eat, drink, and sleep what, once or twice a season?  That there's no damp/warm stone designation for water/magma flows that you cause?  Not requiring 3 extra designations (dig partial, brace, complete dig, remove brace) to breach a liquid seems like a strange place to draw the line of "this needs to be realistic!".  Not to mention, as has been stated, you would need to brace the wall while using the current version of channeling to breach a liquid.  Does it break your suspension of disbelief that you can do that?  Since there's no bracing of walls, do you sacrifice a dwarf any time you want to breach magma, since you don't have the proper commands to tell him how to realistic do it without incinerating himself?

And since it's going to be addressed in the "realistic mining", why are we stuck with "partial realism" that doesn't allow us to reach realistic end results?  Are you going to not breach liquids until the realistic mining is added so it doesn't break your suspension of disbelief?

[Sean Mirrsen]

First of all, Reality is Unrealistic. Second of all, stop exaggerating. The answer to everything here, as with everything in DF, is and has always been this - "It's not here, because it's not here yet." Once Toady is bored enough, I'm sure we'll see proper breaching of liquids. With braces, or with demolition charges. We may be able to lower floodgates into water or carve them out of the living rock. The most important thing is that right now, we have the ramping channels. Reverting them to the old way will upset some of the players, even just adding the old channel designation back will upset some people (a minority, I'm sure). The best thing to do now, or in the near future, would be to facilitate the new channels' integration in the game, by removing bugs that negatively affect it and supplementing it with a largely unrealistic, but perfectly-acceptable-as-far-as-the-game-goes ability to remove downward ramps from above regardless of what they're submerged in. This will keep the pro-new crowd pleased, even more so, and reduce the grumpiness of the pro-old crowd to a minimum, getting a net increase in happiness of the community.

[Pilsu]

That will take time though. I don't really want to wait two years to get channeling that isn't causing more bugs & problems when it could be reverted for the time being without much of a downside.

[zwei]

First of all, Reality is Unrealistic. Second of all, stop exaggerating. The answer to everything here, as with everything in DF, is and has always been this - "It's not here, because it's not here yet." Once Toady is bored enough, I'm sure we'll see proper breaching of liquids. With braces, or with demolition charges. We may be able to lower floodgates into water or carve them out of the living rock. The most important thing is that right now, we have the ramping channels. Reverting them to the old way will upset some of the players, even just adding the old channel designation back will upset some people (a minority, I'm sure). The best thing to do now, or in the near future, would be to facilitate the new channels' integration in the game, by removing bugs that negatively affect it and supplementing it with a largely unrealistic, but perfectly-acceptable-as-far-as-the-game-goes ability to remove downward ramps from above regardless of what they're submerged in. This will keep the pro-new crowd pleased, even more so, and reduce the grumpiness of the pro-old crowd to a minimum, getting a net increase in happiness of the community.

I am sure that if ramps would be removable from above, my grumpiness index would be quite low indeed.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I'm of the opinion that Toady would rather like to fix a pair of bugs he'll have to eventually tackle anyway, rather than try to rewrite the thing again and risk introducing more bugs. Keep in mind as well, that fixing bugs is what's being done in the coming weeks/months, and "reverting" likely won't happen until the initial bugfix series of releases is done.

Though I guess I can't read the Toad's mind. Although.. hmm...

*sits down on the couch, big yellow "Telepathy For Dummies" book in hand*

[Squirrelloid]

First of all, Reality is Unrealistic. Second of all, stop exaggerating. The answer to everything here, as with everything in DF, is and has always been this - "It's not here, because it's not here yet." Once Toady is bored enough, I'm sure we'll see proper breaching of liquids. With braces, or with demolition charges. We may be able to lower floodgates into water or carve them out of the living rock. The most important thing is that right now, we have the ramping channels. Reverting them to the old way will upset some of the players, even just adding the old channel designation back will upset some people (a minority, I'm sure). The best thing to do now, or in the near future, would be to facilitate the new channels' integration in the game, by removing bugs that negatively affect it and supplementing it with a largely unrealistic, but perfectly-acceptable-as-far-as-the-game-goes ability to remove downward ramps from above regardless of what they're submerged in. This will keep the pro-new crowd pleased, even more so, and reduce the grumpiness of the pro-old crowd to a minimum, getting a net increase in happiness of the community.

1) Don't remove the only way to accomplish something until the new feature that allows it to be done in an alternate way is here, now.  (In this case, breaching freezing biome aquifers and leaving clean and safe liquid breaches).  Its all well and good to say 'x is coming' (although *you* have no way of knowing, do you?), but the correct approach is to remove the old methods *after* the new methods are available.

1.1) Not everything can or should be added to the game.  Old channeling was an acceptable abstraction of wall breaching and climbing/rope use to represent the finished state of the tile.

2) Turn your comment back on itself - the answer to 'unfair' moating is better siege AI.  Its coming.  By your own logic quickfixes are not the answer, so why do you support this one.  (Just pointing out how hypocritical your own logic is, not saying i agree with it since i believe the quickfix doesn't actually fix anything).

3) Upsetting a tiny minority of players is not a reason not to do something, especially since the change is clearly annoying to a large number of players.  >60% want the old channeling functionality back in (sum both channeling are good and old channeling is good votes).

4) Both crowds can be satisfied by allowing the new functionality via a different designation.  Then nothing is lost.  Anyone who gets upset at how *someone else* plays the game should be ignored, and rightfully so.  The existence of a designation doesn't make you use it.

5) The bug fixes to poblems created by new channeling are likely to be quite difficult to fix, and might go multiple major versions before a good fix is implemented.  Far better and easier to simply revert to the known working version than to wait for all the bugs to be ironed out.  I mean, pathfinding is only going to experience more and more bugs - relying on a pathfinding fix is virtually hopeless since it'd probably just get broken every single version.

6) Functionality is key.  There are things new channeling cannot accomplish that old channeling could, and that functionality needs to be restored.  And there's no single solution to the functionality fix (avoiding miner loss breaching a frozen aquifer will not be solved in the same way as lack of clean liquid breaches).

Your post is basically 'I lost, but suck it up - nothing should be done because its the way it is' with overtones of 'if you don't like to play the game the way i do, the way you're playing is wrong!'  That attitude is offensive.

[Silverionmox]

Then make it require braces. Just doing it with a pick is quite silly; breaks my suspension of disbelief. Breaching a body of liquid is not trivial, so it shouldn't be trivialized just like digging any old trench. The issue will be addressed again with "realistic mining" in any case.

So you can't possibly imagine that as part of mining/channeling, your dwarves use braces, because you didn't tell them to?  How do you deal with the fact that 1 tree gives you a log that can be used to build a 10 foot section of wall?  That digging through soil leaves no dirt/clutter?  The fact that your dawrves eat, drink, and sleep what, once or twice a season?  That there's no damp/warm stone designation for water/magma flows that you cause?  Not requiring 3 extra designations (dig partial, brace, complete dig, remove brace) to breach a liquid seems like a strange place to draw the line of "this needs to be realistic!".  Not to mention, as has been stated, you would need to brace the wall while using the current version of channeling to breach a liquid.  Does it break your suspension of disbelief that you can do that?  Since there's no bracing of walls, do you sacrifice a dwarf any time you want to breach magma, since you don't have the proper commands to tell him how to realistic do it without incinerating himself?

And since it's going to be addressed in the "realistic mining", why are we stuck with "partial realism" that doesn't allow us to reach realistic end results?  Are you going to not breach liquids until the realistic mining is added so it doesn't break your suspension of disbelief?

I'm actually not opposed at all to the practical measure (putting in the old channeling as well, for the time being). It's mostly about the principle: when something new doesn't work out as an improvement on all fronts, you don't immediately clamor for the old one. Additionally, you don't shoot down something new for something trivial like a flashing ramp that's aesthetically uncomfortable.

[Ilmoran]

I'm actually not opposed at all to the practical measure (putting in the old channeling as well, for the time being). It's mostly about the principle: when something new doesn't work out as an improvement on all fronts, you don't immediately clamor for the old one. Additionally, you don't shoot down something new for something trivial like a flashing ramp that's aesthetically uncomfortable.

You specifically said to make it require braces, because doing it with just picks breaks your suspension of disbelief; that sure sounds like your opposed to having the old channeling back.

And you're not opposed to the old channeling going back in, but you're upset that people want it back (Your principle of not clamoring for the old because they don't like the new)?  People aren't "shooting down something new"; I don't think there's anyone in the thread who wants the functionality of the old channeling and wants the new channeling removed.  But there are plenty of people who want the new channeling and absolutely do not want the old channeling to even co-exist with the new (the realism crowd who refuses to accept that there are ways to handle digging out a pit without ending up in it or breaching a liquid after removing most of the material from the wall).  People wanting to be able to remove annoying flashing ramps is reasonable, especially since they aren't asking for a knee-jerk reaction of completely removing the current version of channeling.

[Andir]

Or just the ability to remove ramps from above -.-

Same... I liked the old channel because it permitted me the ability to make channels, not ditches.  If I want to surround my fort in a one tile channel with no way up or down, I have to sacrifice a dwarf now.