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[ray10k]

actually, I don't think that it would cause the game to lag constantly, since in only 2 cases checks and movements need to be executed:
1: a 7/7 square of sand is emptied, notifies all surrounding tiles containing more than, say, 2/7 sand, flow is executed until a stable state is reached
2: the floor under a square of sand is removed (hatch, bridge), the sand falls and notifies the neighboring sand.

this system would mean that most of the time, the sand would be effectively ignored by the cpu, while causing no more lag than flowing water would.

finaly, I'd imagine the "flow" system to work much like this:

1:if there currently is no floor under this tile, drop all sand on this tile one z-level(may be triggered by a hatch opening or a cave-in.)
2:if currently there is 1/7 or 2/7 sand on this tile, do nothing.
3:if there is a tile with at least 2 sand less than this tile, move 1 sand to that tile.

[Iden]

No because if you have nothing but sand, you can't build a fortress out of sand. However, it could be possible, by packing the sand.

How about baking bricks in a kiln? *1*2
or How about turning sand/clay into mudbricks by letting them dry in the sun (for areas without fuel for a kiln - would take longer to create bricks)? *1*2

Sort of like Stone -> Blocks -- Sand/Clay -> Bricks

How building walls out of similar materials without even using bricks? *3

Links:
*1 Mudbricks
*2 Adobe
*3 Cob


As a side note, I'd just like to ask: Is it even possible to have a map with nothing but sand? 

[Cotes]

The idea that water should just plain ignore sand or otherwise flow through it isn't a great one in my opinion.

I'm not an expert on the subject, but it's not even realistic. You can dig a hole in sand by water (with some distance between the waterline and the hole) without immediately finding it full of water. It would make even less sense to do it like that when you realize you could fill up entire deserts with wet sand simply connecting them to a river with one tile wide channel. In reality the ground eventually absorb the water much faster than water could make its way through sand.

The system that has stacks of water atop stacks of sand is better, possibly with some wet sand mechanism.

Where it gets actually difficult is how flowing and pressurized water interact with sand.

[Jayce]

Just make sand very unstable and prone to collapse.

[iceball3]

heres a good idea. have sand turn into a wet sand solid block that is created when sand at least 5/7 touches water of 3/7 or more, so you have a murky pool surrounded by "wet sand"(that turns to 5/7 sand and some 1/7 water on a cavein or when mined out) when it rains, so a murky pool won't just collapse on itself. and if the sand dries for too long, it becomes dry sand, which will yeild rock when mined out or turn to wet sand when 3/7 or more water touches it. it shouldn't become wet sand when smoothed.
the wet sand idea should work with hills filled with sand as wet sand won't just poor out until mined.

[Xainiax]

if this is ever implemented then we should get a sand screw for moving sand up zlevels as well as a mixture + catalyst system where if things that would catalyze can occur anywhere for example a glass furnace that is mobile so you can glass the walls of your sand cavern

[Glech]

This board is very confusing...

But having sand physics sounds like a great idea!

[Draco18s]

This board is very confusing...

Welcome to dwarf fortress forums!

At least the interface is good.

[konzill]

Adding sand physics would be very desirable in my opinion, even if it makes embarkation harder some on some maps. . it could also be a first step to removing the magma glass furnace perpetual raw green glass generator by having every chunk of raw glass use 1/7 unit of sand.

I suspect that Improved hauling might be necessary first, to make shifting piles and piles of sand more feasable even if you run out of sacks.

[iceball3]

Talk about a bump...
Anyway, should a player really expect running out of sand? Sure physics seem cool, but using up the sand might damage the abstraction a bit, expecting to use up a sand desert through glass is like expecting to use up the magma sea due to forging projects, or dwarves suffacating due to a lack of paths to the surface, etc.

[jei]

Nice graphics!

I believe the biggest problem with this kind of system is that it takes a lot of CPU power. A map with water only takes a lot of memory or processing power as it does -- adding sand physics would slow things down further, especially if you're throwing in interactions between sand and water.

I vote for adding threading and multicore support.
One core for the Magma, Another core for Water and a third core for Sand.
And One core to rule them all and to Armok bind them.

[Bohandas]

ragarding sand walls, I think its easiest just to assume that the walls have some sort of basic reinforcements added as they are dug, like in the game Dungeon Keeper.

[jei]

Quicksand is more than just sand mixed with water, or else the concept of "going to the beach" would be slightly more dangerous than it is today.

Yes, quicksand is a colloid hydrogel blah blah blah.. I have wikipedia too.

Edit: I know enough about quicksand to know that Mythbusters failed to make it correctly.

With flowing sand like this there could still be quicksand.

What about making concrete in DF? Can we have concrete too? Nothing like giving concrete boots to those goblins....

[konzill]

Talk about a bump...
Anyway, should a player really expect running out of sand? Sure physics seem cool, but using up the sand might damage the abstraction a bit, expecting to use up a sand desert through glass is like expecting to use up the magma sea due to forging projects, or dwarves suffacating due to a lack of paths to the surface, etc.

On a standard 4x4 embark area each layer has 36,864 tiles. I'm assuming that a desert may have say four sand layers giving 147,456 tiles of sand and with each producing 7 bags this would allow you to produce 1,032,192 .

I'm not sure how long it takes to collect sand and make glass from it. If its 200 game steps, it would take 1 glass furnace going nonstop 512 game years to work through that much sand.  removing a desert in half a millennium seems reasonable to me. Yes you could speed this up if you had 10 furnaces but it would still be 51 years. Yes using all the sand in a desert is unrealistic but so is mining entirely through the crust (down to the magam sea), and does not take anywhere near as long.

[jei]

This sand-model is pretty good and could be used to model SNOW and sludge and other semi-solid materials as well, such as semi-molten rock. Maybe even ICE that is freezing and implement slow freezing and melting (or temperature for water-material), which would make pumping water out during winter something cool.