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[marcusbjol]

Urist McAxelord got waylaid by carp next to the river.  He gets dragged into the river.  Due to Urist being next to the edge of the map and the drainage point for the river(water level at 3), he promptly slew all the carp, and stood in the river.

For Months.

If I did not actively look for Urist, I would not have sent in a miner to dig a ramp down to him at the edge of the river.

Most of the water is depicted as being contained in a pit having an edge with a 90 degree dropoff.  This is not "natural".   I have had a dorf get trapped in an empty murky pool because he built a wall to block access from the pool to the underground farm.  To get the dwarf out, I had to unbuild the wall or make a ramp down.  All this because the dorf could not walk out of a drained pond?

It should be pretty easy to run a process just after embark to convert the land at edges of the water into ramps.

[doctorspoof]

Maybe not for brooks and streams, what with the grate-like 'roof' over it, but for rivers and pools etc., I support this idea
How many natural rivers do you see with 90 degree banks? Other than canyons, etc, but thats a different matter.

[marcusbjol]

Even for streams and brooks, just under the grate structure.

[Pilsu]

I'd prefer if the ramps weren't displayed at all. Dealing with yet more flashing ramps will get irritating. An init option would be fine.

Swimming needs a rework though. If you fall into a river and can't swim, you should drown. Pretty much every time. Now, falling onto the ramp itself is different but I don't want to see dwarves fall into the middle of a river and immediately get out. It trivializes the danger water poses for people who can't swim.


Having no Armor User skill should mitigate swimming skill based on weight worn. Speaking of weight, how dense are dwarves?

[j0nas]

Urist McAxelord got waylaid by carp next to the river.  He gets dragged into the river.  Due to Urist being next to the edge of the map and the drainage point for the river(water level at 3), he promptly slew all the carp, and stood in the river.

For Months.

If I did not actively look for Urist, I would not have sent in a miner to dig a ramp down to him at the edge of the river.

Been there, done exactly that.

Yes, this would be cool, but of course rivers/etc should not be surrounded by ramps.  Whether or not there are ramps should be decided by something, maybe chance, maybe the kind of soil/rock it's floating through at that point, maybe the overall steepness of the area it's in.  But some ramps here and there would be very nice.

[Aquillion]

Some river banks really are steep like this.

I don't like the ramps everywhere thing we have right now -- it's basically a cludge, I think, until adventurers learn how to climb (or dig their own stairs / ramps.)  More cliffs are more interesting in terms of movement, combat, defense and so forth.

[Wyrm]

Swimming needs a rework though. If you fall into a river and can't swim, you should drown. Pretty much every time. Now, falling onto the ramp itself is different but I don't want to see dwarves fall into the middle of a river and immediately get out. It trivializes the danger water poses for people who can't swim.

If I could hold my breath for hours on end, drowning would be a pretty trivial danger.

Besides, why do you think that the function of a river is to pose a drowning danger to dwarves?

Meanwhile, ramped banks would resolve most issues cleanly, as falling into the middle of a river is at best rare, and that case will resolve when we fix the time it takes for a dorf to drown.

[Footkerchief]

This has come up a couple times:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=24930.0
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=22172.0

It's a good idea, though.

[Hyndis]

Ramps are good. If a dwarf is unconscious and falls into the river he's dead. If the dwarf is conscious and uninjured he should be able to wade out of the river just fine. In real life the banks of rivers and lakes are almost always sloped such that you need to walk quite a ways out into the water to be in danger of drowning.

[Silverionmox]

It would also allow to have smaller, less wide brook ends. The smalles can just be one row of ramps: essentially just a small kind of ditch you can step over, but which still contains water.

[Areyar]

Though I personally dig ramps into all water bodies my dwarves may get near to ASAP, the way ramps are displayed is pretty annoying.
A possible solution might be determining a 'z-level' as actually two layers:
-Uneven layers are real levels and even numbers the ramps.
- -ramps could then be displayed bleached and +ramps in darkened colours.

In effect all creatures would then be able to scale 90 degree slopes, but not steeper ones (due to the inherent ramp functionality of needing a flat surface at the other level in the direction of travel)
Also all slopes of 90 degrees or less will automatically be considered slopes.

some more remarks:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A possible negative side effect would be that the dimensions of Z-level and tile area would be more likely considered of around 1m^3 dimensions rather than an unknown quantity.
(it is entirely possible to scale 90 degree obstacles below headheight without much climbing skill.)
I seem to remember Toady mentioning some difficulty with how climbing should be handled. Climbing could be defined as being able to fly/hover IF adjacent tile has a solid surface. The problem he alluded to could have been breaking the pathfindingAI, in that case; I dont know, IIRC flyer pathing was broken still.

[Rowanas]

Why did Toady change
the way he displays the ramps
they were fine before.

[Areyar]

AFAIK he has not.
Above post was a possible suggestion to alter the concept of ramps.

[Rowanas]

I thought they had changed
maybe that was channeling
I am so confused

[Starver]

I thought they had changed
maybe that was channeling
I am so confused

Yes, channelling is now "dig a down ramp", where you are channelling through more than the vestigial floor into an open area below.

I've previously asked for a "dig down ramp" (mostly for strip-mining reasons, where one doesn't want to accidentally undermine a tree or other potential cave-in item with an up-ramp request, to be honest) but I do rather miss the old channelling creating an unramped ditch.

Ramps themselves (once emplaced by either terrain generation or however they are dug out) are as yet unchanged.  And the above idea seems to me to be a bit like a final "weathering" option on the map terrain generation.


A system that would not work well with the current game (both display and data structure), and goes quite a bit further than the "uneven" (you mean "odd number"?) and "even" level idea, is to have the 8 levels of tile filler (as representable by the one traditionally infinitesimally thick layer of floor, where present, and up to seven layers of fluid above it) be represented in finer detail would allow digging to be made (or simulated as) removing up to 8/8ths of any tile, (and each 1/8th directly to a unit of material, that needs spreading into adjacent tiles) and could be set to allow effective ramps of many different steepnesses.  Single or double-eighths of difference between adjacent tiles would be hardly more than terrain undulations (though enough to cause rain to pool, and one could imagine dynamic weathering and erosion occurring during the rain that comes during game-play, and possibly the footsteps of dwarfs over well-travelled routes that currently 'ensoil' grasslands, as well as allowing snow-drifting behaviour in hollows and against walls, if one wanted to complicate such things), with around 4/8ths difference (within or between adjacent Z-levels) being counted as a standard traversable ramp for hauled wagons (of two beasts or more?) or pack animals without some sort of [SUREFOOT] tag in their raw and 6/8ths being walkable (with load) by bipeds and [SUREFOOT]s while 8/8ths traversable by bipeds without anything hauled (or maybe at least one hand free of weapon/tool/shield, which might bring in a requirement for scabbards, belt loops, etc being craft items), or [MOUNTAINSUREFOOT] creatures.  Any difference that meant a >8/8ths total difference being a cliff would require specific climbing equipment (TBA, though maybe related to Toady's idea of a rope for stairless downwards travel) or whatever tags GCSs and the like would display, or of course flight.  All those values being open to adjustment based on the creature involved, inherent climbing abilities and possibly the material of the 'wall' involved[0].

When it comes to river-edge squares, any eighths of water are assessed as a rounded down half value, to account for buoyancy, maybe (although this might or might not take into account the weight and/or overall density of worn equipment[1]) so that a puddle at the bottom of a pit doesn't let one escape, but it being totally full gives one a distinct help.  (May mean a redesign of moat-strategies, but not much more that already done between 40D and now.)  You could even translate that to magma (cut down even more, with even more buoyancy ), for those creatures where that doesn't already induce death in itself...

But that's a speculative idea based on some (long-term, if ever) suggestions already previously made, not a suggestion in its own right.

• It would be arguable whether raw soil is easier that rock or harder, because it having less structural strength could work either way on whether hand-holds could be made.  Might need more complexity.  But I sort of envisage built stone block walls as more unclimbable than those made of unprocessed stone rubble that leaves plenty of footholds, and smoothed natural stone walls (in certain types of rock) being pretty much unclimable by all creatures without some inherent wall-climbing/ceiling-traversal nature.
[1] And anything that could not dropped and abandoned.  Maybe with agent logic so that they might drop a sword to escape a flooded square, to remove a backpack to allow them to re-enter the square to

try to reclaim the sword and get back on the bank to re-equip...  But that leads to complex fording behaviour where a unit might make multiple trips across a watercourse to get themselves and all their armour/weapons across...  Sounds too complex for the current incarnation, though in Adventure Mode it might be a valid player strategy if weight of equipment starts to matter so much in swimming and general river-extrication....