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[TolyK]

iirc the problem was that magma traps and such would be MUCH harder to do (you need to line all your tunnels with magma-proof stuff, yadda yadda) but the water solubility would be nice.

hmm I'm thinking init options 

[Jeoshua]

Maybe you should.  Realistically, would YOU pipe red hot magma through sandstone pipes? Or would you install something more... metallic?

[Askot Bokbondeler]

i can't really see steel holding magma either

[NW_Kohaku]

iirc the problem was that magma traps and such would be MUCH harder to do (you need to line all your tunnels with magma-proof stuff, yadda yadda) but the water solubility would be nice.

hmm I'm thinking init options 

I thought the problem was that it would require much more checks.

If a salt wall has to check if it is adjacent to a water-bearing tile, then every some-odd frames, the game will probably wind up checking all the walls in the fortress to see which walls are salt walls, and then having to check each salt wall for adjacency to water.  Keeping in mind the hundreds of thousands of walls in a typical fortress embark site, you'll see why that sort of thing can be problematic.  It's the reason temperature is such a problem, as well.

Something like a "not-liquids-compatible" token (or conversely, a "is-liquids-compatible") token in a stone raw is fairly easy - you only have to check them when you are making the materials. 

[Rose]

you only need to check the walls when the water is spreading, and mark the ones that need to eventually dissolve.

[JohnieRWilkins]

So saturated salt water soln doesn't dissolve salt stuff anymore? This can get ugly fast.

[Mel_Vixen]

On a different topic than the new awesome cities...
Are we going to have things made from water soluble materials like rock salt and saltpeter degrade and dissolve in the future? Perhaps at a minimum prevent these materials from being used for certain purposes such as making pots which will be exposed to liquids.

I would love to see this, along with non-magma safe stone (both natural and contructed stuff) to melt when in contact with magma.  This last part could be especially interesting when paired with 3d ore veins of non-magma safe ore.  Horizontal lava-tubes, anyone?   

I would like to see that. The problem is iirc. that the temperature of the magma is uniform thus each tile has the same temperature. This would lead to entire layers melting. Without some way to model heat flow, which would also need thermal conductivity as material attribute, you wont get you horizontal tubes.

If such a model is found i would bet the first thing some players would do would be building a "freezing chamber".

As for water disolving salt, limestone etc: Yes please! But make it so that dissolved materials get dumped somewhere else in form of stalact/mites, crusts etc. 


Back to towns.

I hope the bigger citys get more then one Marketplace, many of the bigger citys had smaller markets for the dayli stuff like food or firewood (medieval walmart?). I also would like to see multiple layered walls and trenches around the city.

Another stimulus for growth by the way were rights the city could obtain. Say the right to brew beer, minting coins or staple rights on certain goods thus the wealth of a certain city has not entirely to base on the surrounding land and resources.

Btw. as this map shows the these lone buildings out in the fields did exist. If you compare that to the two maps i linked earlyer you can see how the city grows and that toadys estimate isnt that wrong. I think the problem with toadys map is that the divide between town and farmland is a bit to hard.

[Osmosis Jones]

you only need to check the walls when the water is spreading, and mark the ones that need to eventually dissolve.

We already have the game flag wall tiles as wet, so couldnt we just have a tag that says if wall is 'damp', check surrounding tiles (8 around, and 1 above) for open, water-filled tiles. I personally would then make it a requirement to check if the water is flowing.
Two reasons for this;
1) Solutes dissolve slowly without mixing, because the water immediately next to the salt etc is very concentrated, meaning its difficult for excess salt to dissolve. Flowing water means its constantly adding fresh water, so the concentration of salt in water next to the solid is always low, and the solid salt will dissolve far faster.

2) Rock salt as a mineral is actually a lot more robust than you might think. It doesn't disolve like your nice fine table salt; it's generally been weathered already, and has reprecipitated into large, hard to dissolve crystals. I'm not saying its insoluble, just that it takes a fair bit more effort to get it to do so. As such, the mechanical action from flowing water (and the detritus it carries) helps in breaking up the crystals into a more soluble size.

Then, if everything is satisifed, damage the rock as with mining. Sufficient damage, and the wall goes poof.

Re the city discussion; going back to the obvious circular nature of the cities, couldn't we just delete the roads between the isolated houses? It's not perfect, but it does make the preplanned city shape a bit less obvious.

[NW_Kohaku]

Btw. as this map shows the these lone buildings out in the fields did exist. If you compare that to the two maps i linked earlyer you can see how the city grows and that toadys estimate isnt that wrong. I think the problem with toadys map is that the divide between town and farmland is a bit to hard.

Actually, that shows what I was talking about fairly well - the problem isn't so much that there are houses out there, but the problem is the roads.

The roads in the Toady mockup are a grid, as if the city was already being planned out over in the fields. 

The roads in the map just stretch past the small clusters of farmhouses and head directly to town.  It looks more like a spiderweb, with roads radiating out fo a central point and a cluster of cross-hatched roads in the middle, and then there is just a couple ring roads out beyond that one.

[Miuramir]

The other point I would like to bring up is the kind of development seen in, for example, this and this screenshot. Look at how the city has grown in those - only one side of the river is being settled (so far), but that side has been built on to it's limit. It looks a bit funny, seeming how people would want to be as close to "fresh" water as possible and should spread out along the river before they start "broadening" it away from the water. It doesn't really look like "natural" growth when it builds mostly on one side first, as it seems to do, judging from the majority of the shots provided.

This is not actually that unusual; particularly where the river is winding, and the town is situated on the upper side of the river where a bend comes near to the edge of the primary floodplain.  One side will be higher, drier ground and a bit better for buildings; the other side will be lower, more frequently flooded ground that is better for farming and grazing.  London is the classic example here; the 1300 map of London and surrounding areas of Westminster and Southwark is instructive.  By 1300 London had nearly 100,000 inhabitants, and Westminster upriver and Southwark across the river in the marshes were still considered separate towns. 

Another consideration is that crossing a river is likely to be either dangerous or expensive; not something that ordinary folk will want to do every day.  Having one or a few folk from the farm paying to ford, ferry, or bridge some of your products to the monthly or maybe even weekly market is probably a reasonable cost of doing business, but it's unlikely even that reduced traffic would be cost-effective daily; and having to "commute" any significant fraction of your stock or personnel would likely be right out in this time period.  It would not be uncommon for people to walk several hours to market, but paying rare cash money for a toll (bridge, ferry, etc.) or risking loosing livestock (or yourself) while fording would be something that had to be carefully considered. 

[NW_Kohaku]

This is not actually that unusual; particularly where the river is winding, and the town is situated on the upper side of the river where a bend comes near to the edge of the primary floodplain.  One side will be higher, drier ground and a bit better for buildings; the other side will be lower, more frequently flooded ground that is better for farming and grazing.  London is the classic example here; the 1300 map of London and surrounding areas of Westminster and Southwark is instructive.  By 1300 London had nearly 100,000 inhabitants, and Westminster upriver and Southwark across the river in the marshes were still considered separate towns. 

Another consideration is that crossing a river is likely to be either dangerous or expensive; not something that ordinary folk will want to do every day.  Having one or a few folk from the farm paying to ford, ferry, or bridge some of your products to the monthly or maybe even weekly market is probably a reasonable cost of doing business, but it's unlikely even that reduced traffic would be cost-effective daily; and having to "commute" any significant fraction of your stock or personnel would likely be right out in this time period.  It would not be uncommon for people to walk several hours to market, but paying rare cash money for a toll (bridge, ferry, etc.) or risking loosing livestock (or yourself) while fording would be something that had to be carefully considered.

The answer to this obviously being that you don't build a city "with a river cutting through it", but that you build a city "right next to the river". 

It would also stop the notion that a city is always a circle if you build it as a sort-of-hemisphere sort-of-blob sticking to the edge of the river. 

[Jeoshua]

The problem is iirc. that the temperature of the magma is uniform thus each tile has the same temperature. This would lead to entire layers melting.

Easy peasy.  Don't have igneous layer stone that isn't magma safe, but ore could very well be.  If there is a layer stone that isn't magma safe yet is spawned near magma, it shouldn't melt when you start the map.  Rather, it should never generate in that position in the first place!  Simple enough to cull during world-gen, I should think.

[monk12]

The problem is iirc. that the temperature of the magma is uniform thus each tile has the same temperature. This would lead to entire layers melting.

Easy peasy.  Don't have igneous layer stone that isn't magma safe, but ore could very well be.  If there is a layer stone that isn't magma safe yet is spawned near magma, it shouldn't melt when you start the map.  Rather, it should never generate in that position in the first place!  Simple enough to cull during world-gen, I should think.

The problem arising when you pump the magma to the surface and pour it out onto the battlefield, where it begins melting its way back down to the mantle.

[Sowelu]

I'm imagining that, at present, cities claim a certain region of land for "this is my site" early on.  External fields are new sites, added as needed.  Hence the preplanned look of that city; it has to be, because land is claimed in advance.

Once sites can expand over time, I'm sure cities will do better there.

That said, it's almost unimaginable to me that cities would not be generated during worldgen, but would instead be retroactively created later.  That's asking for trouble, because it means a city you've visited as an adventurer will likely develop in a different way over time (once that's implemented) than one you have never visited.

Remember that it's ideal that people will create a world and then play LOTS AND LOTS in that one world, without needing to gen a new one.

[wlerin]

The problem is iirc. that the temperature of the magma is uniform thus each tile has the same temperature. This would lead to entire layers melting.

Easy peasy.  Don't have igneous layer stone that isn't magma safe, but ore could very well be.  If there is a layer stone that isn't magma safe yet is spawned near magma, it shouldn't melt when you start the map.  Rather, it should never generate in that position in the first place!  Simple enough to cull during world-gen, I should think.

The problem arising when you pump the magma to the surface and pour it out onto the battlefield, where it begins melting its way back down to the mantle.

Magma should not do this. Think about it. Real world magma is gradually losing heat to the surrounding rock as it approaches the surface. Yes, it melts some rock, but not much--It does far more pushing than actual melting. Unless you want your magma to gradual cool and harden into pumice and lava rock, don't ask for it to melt the walls (even if it did, it wouldn't happen instantly. Melting solid rock takes a much longer time than melting a tinfoil hat. less exposed surface area.)