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[stormsaber]

Hallo folks!

One thing that seems very dorfy and in keeping with the design of many of my forts is hidden doors and secret passages. I doubt I'm alone in this. In game terms, the idea is that a hidden door functions exactly like a door, but with a 'workshop profile' that allows the door to be used only by certain dwarves or professions. For invaders, the door cannot be destroyed or pathed through unless a member of the invader's caste has previously 'seen' the door being used by a dwarf - at this point, the hidden door is known and becomes vulnerable to building-destroyers and can be pathed through like an open door. This could be very useful for windy secret tunnels for emergency escapes in seiges, for sending armies through to ambush an invading army from behind by popping out of a small shrub, 'fortress of solitude' type throne rooms for nobles, etc.

Some ways of designating such a feature...
1) Allow a 'hidden door' to be built using a door and two mechanisms on top of a previously built smooth or constructed wall
2) Allow a 'hidden door' to be built in empty space provided the empty space is surrounded by rough floor (for example a 1x1 channel outside) using a floor hatch, two mechanisms, and a rock block.
3) As 2, but inside, surrounded by smooth floor, using a statue
4) Allow a secret door to be built on top of a previously constructed throne which now becomes impassable to all except the owner
5) As 2 but using a table

You could generalise this to allow a hidden door to be built onto any piece of constructed furniture or wall but these are the most obvious 5 that spring to mind.

Cheers,

Daniel

[Medicine Man]

That sounds like a great idea.I would LOVE this.

[RCIX]

I like it! +1

[quinnr]

Whoa, awesome idea.

[Kilo24]

To be the lone nitpicker here, I'm not quite sure how well that would work with the pathfinding system.  It is built upon the premise that any creature within one contiguous area can get to anywhere in that area, regardless of its identity or abilities.  For example, flying creatures don't work well currently.

That doesn't mean in can't be fixed eventually (or that we or Toady couldn't think of a way to solve that efficiently.)  It would be a pretty good idea, then.

[j0nas]

Awesome.  But I can't help but feel that this should require a masterwork door and a masterwork mechanism.

[Medicine Man]

Awesome.  But I can't help but feel that this should require a masterwork door and a masterwork mechanism.

I would say that you would need a high skill carpenter and a high skill mechanic to make a "hidden" mechanism and door.

[jaynestown]

What you want to do is allow doors and hatches, like workshops, to be allowed a set profile.  By default they're accessible to everyone.  However, you could set only specific individuals to be able to access the door and pass through it.  That's all you need to make it "Hidden" to everyone else.  When you select the "hide" command, like you would for a stone or any other item, it simply disappears off the map (cosmetically) and is replaced with the wall or floor that would otherwise have been.

This would be especially neat in succession games, where the next player might not release you've hidden a back door somewhere.  It would also be funny when a noble dies in his private quarters, and you're forced to send miners to break through the wall to get the body out or re-use the room.

If you want it to work against enemies, you could have a Stone Detailer perform the operation, then assign it a certain ambush skill based on the skill level of the engraver.  Enemies who pass close to it might notice and use it to enter the fort.  Otherwise it appears to them as a wall.  However, this is getting more and more complicated, as then, say, goblins would need special behavior added where they wander around looking for doors at all the cliff faces until they find one.

Neat idea.

[LordDemon]

I don't know how much the pathfinding would change. Doors can already be blocked, and there already is a split (door can be accessible for dwarfs, or pets, both or neither). The division would just have to be spread around.

[Starver]

Being in Adventurer mode, the other day, and finding a Dwarven stairwell pit with a lone (ramp-slit accessible) room at the bottom with no other apparent exits out of it[1][2] (though, later, I encountered ampersands wandering around the place, so the game, at least, thought that there was some sort of connection with something down there, even if it was only fudging it) I went around "L"ooking around intently to see if there was actually some sort of hidden hatch or door in the bottom room...  Now, if there were hidden doors/etc, they would of course be placed as part of a procedural-furnishing of the (currently just procedurally-dug) dwarven halls, but I could see that being a feature.

Probably also has cross-over coding needs with getting traps and trap-interactions remedied so that Adventure Mode doesn't have (by default, by the relevant init settings) trap-ignore status.


[1] I found a second settlement with a whole column of ramp-rooms, maybe a dozen Z-levels of them, but ultimately the bottom one had zero non-upward exits (visible), and the others were up/down between themselves, only.  That settlement also seemed to have attracted ampersands.  So far, none of my other explorations (with another adventurer, the original one succumbing to a whole-body skin disease caught from the sprayed-on extract from a ridiculously easy-to-kill ampersand or two) have touched upon dwarven settlements, but human and darker-being settlements (of varying current ownership and intermediate provenance) seem to be quite normal, and once I worked out the trick with Megabeast caves, I found the all-pervasive subterranean systems interesting (though haven't yet tried to navigate between cave-sites using them).

[2] Had considered trying to embark on/near it to either discover its layout through play or by getting the Reveal thing to show me  anything I'd missed.

[Spectre9000]

ZOMG NECRO!

>.>

but seriously, this is a good idea, and would really love for this to be implemented. So... instead of creating a new post, I'm adding my voice to a previous one to show that the desire for this was, and still is, there.

[Z49000]

Hidden doors and trapdoors... This would add a lot of fun to my forts, especially if I could troll the Gobs (or dorfs) and have the only way into the fort be a set of hidden doors or make trapdoors that, with the flick of a switch, drop a gob or dorf into a labyrinth to be promptly eaten by a nearby forgotten beast. I like it.

Seriously, this would also make adventure forts more... interesting.

[Vattic]

It came up on DF Talk at least once.

Threetoe: Okay so now it's time for the question-and-answer part of the show. The first question comes from Dave, and he asks, "Would it be possible to set travel-restricted zones that indicated a direction? For example, two staircases: one that could be designated as up and the other one as down."
Toady: So the problem with this kind of thing, with secret doors and one-way pathfinding, is just technical, in terms of how you calculate that. It kind of screws up the connected-component numbers that we've got, so I don't really have a good solution for it. It's one of those things that we'd like to do, but it's a hard problem.

[kinngrimm]

ZOMG NECRO!
...

*blush* so hi there, any news on the hidden doors feature request?

[Shonai_Dweller]

ZOMG NECRO!
...

*blush* so hi there, any news on the hidden doors feature request?

Toady noted it, along with the 3000 other suggestions. t'll happen or not. He doesn't work to request.
Please don't necro unless you're adding actual ideas to a suggestion. Bumping here doesn't magically alter Toady's notes.