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[TolyK]

so basically you're saying, move to metric units.
I agree.

[Leonard DeVir]

I really like the ideas. It would be so much more realistic. If Im getting this right, you propose that (example!):

1) one tile can hold x amounts of material m in SI unit, and not just "one item of material x"
2) If one tile is filled up with material m, the next tile of the stockpile will be filled up
3) if you need to craft something, the dwarf will use y amounts of material m, reducung the stock to x-y=z
4) if you add material m to the stockpile, it would add up to z first before filling another tile
5) and so on

If its that way, I see the problem of visualization, tough. Will it benefit the average Urist McPlayer? You obviously have a great skill with imaginating and juggling numbers, but quite a few people cannot grasp that very well (especially volume and liters; otherwise we all would be phisicists). Especially with very odd numbers (no, not that odd numbers ) like a toy car weighing 0,213kg in stone but just 0,111kg in wood, I think there would be many ?? of the exact meaning of this in regards to size.
 
How to deal with graphic tiles (and tilesets)? Now, it is that 1 sprite = one unit of x (for the most of the time). How do you represent one big 3x3x3m^2 block of stone in many smaller units? Now, its easy to grasp: 1 sprite gives me 1 item of whatever. If you represent 100kg of wood by one tile (example), how do you know its not 100kg but just 78 without going mad by pressing 'k' all the time? Now, I take a glance at my wood stockpile, I see its roughly 10 units of wood and I craft 10 beds. With your system a bed would take like 40kg of wood - now, is this pile 20kg or 80?

I know, things like that wont matter a lot and can be circumvised otherwise, but I think there should be some UI simplifications beforehand, otherwise there may be confusions without "multi tile" objects or weird, hard to imagine values for this otherwise great and well tought of system ("What? Why did the Titan fit...'k'...oh, hes just 2,9m tall, the other one was 3,3m.").
In a nutshell: if this would be implemented, there should be adjustments for visualization.
Hope you het what I mean, english not being my mothertounge and all.

[NW_Kohaku]

I really like the ideas. It would be so much more realistic. If Im getting this right, you propose that (example!):

1) one tile can hold x amounts of material m in SI unit, and not just "one item of material x"
2) If one tile is filled up with material m, the next tile of the stockpile will be filled up
3) if you need to craft something, the dwarf will use y amounts of material m, reducung the stock to x-y=z
4) if you add material m to the stockpile, it would add up to z first before filling another tile
5) and so on

Yes, pretty much.

If its that way, I see the problem of visualization, tough. Will it benefit the average Urist McPlayer? You obviously have a great skill with imaginating and juggling numbers, but quite a few people cannot grasp that very well (especially volume and liters; otherwise we all would be phisicists). Especially with very odd numbers (no, not that odd numbers ) like a toy car weighing 0,213kg in stone but just 0,111kg in wood, I think there would be many ?? of the exact meaning of this in regards to size.

I'm not sure if you mean in the stockpile or when something is just lying around.

If it's in a stockpile, I would think that, given the way that dwarves typically use resources in a constant cycle once the fort gets going, then just eyeballing the stockpile would be enough.

I can tell right now how much food I have pretty easily just by hitting the button to rezoom the screen to my food and booze stockpiles, and looking at how many barrels are sitting there.  It's not a perfectly accurate representation, but all I need to know is "my stockpile looks pretty full, no problems, here".  If I DO want detailed information, that's what the stocks screen is for, and I do spend some time looking at the stocks screen, especially for things like steel or pig iron or iron or coal or coke (because that tends to get plenty of supply hiccups), which tends to get left in bins, and some of those stockpiles are just long rows of bins, where the stocks screen is the only way to get any useful information.

 
How to deal with graphic tiles (and tilesets)? Now, it is that 1 sprite = one unit of x (for the most of the time). How do you represent one big 3x3x3m^2 block of stone in many smaller units? Now, its easy to grasp: 1 sprite gives me 1 item of whatever. If you represent 100kg of wood by one tile (example), how do you know its not 100kg but just 78 without going mad by pressing 'k' all the time? Now, I take a glance at my wood stockpile, I see its roughly 10 units of wood and I craft 10 beds. With your system a bed would take like 40kg of wood - now, is this pile 20kg or 80?

Well, I'll talk about representation in a little bit, but I think I first have to address the philosophy of scale we are talking about in DF.  DF is not a game about individual trees.  DF is a game about clear-cutting a forest to build barrels, beds, and bins on repeat until the end of time.  DF is not a game where you track every individual stone in your stone stockpile.  DF is a game where you quantum stockpile 1,000 stones in one pit.  That one blob represents 1,000 stones now, already.  DF is a game where microcline mugs and lutes and pig tail shirts sit in wooden bins right next to visually identical wooden bins holding coke and steel and iron and serrated steel discs. 

Consider how you play the game, (granted, it may be different than the way I do,) and I think that odds are, you don't have just one stockpile that you can look over and see all the logs available to you graphically on the map.  Most of the time, you have numerous stockpiles spread across the fortress dealing in specialized tasks, and logs come and go in bulk at high speed.  The only time this is not true is during the very first Spring and maybe Summer, and even then, I find that if I want to look for how many logs I have in "stock", then I have to look out in the fields, because nobody's doing any hauling (since the starting seven's skills are so precious that I can't leave just one doing nothing), logs just sit in the field where the tree was chopped down.  Even then, I tend to not care so long as I don't get job cancellation spam because of actually being out of a material, really. 

The only rare items are gems and rare metals, and those all get swallowed up in the rows and rows of bins.  You can't even tell if one bin is a weapons bin or a clothing bin or a fabric bin or a metal bar bin until you actually bring up the look cursor over it, and if you do that, you can see all the data on the individual units you want.

Now then, back to the actual question: As I'm sure you're aware, there are only 256 characters in the current tileset.  There are just not enough characters to represent every nuance of how many items are in the pile.  As long as we cling on to the vestiges of ASCII artwork, (and there are those who will never let go of that, and I think Toady is one of them,) then the standard tileset will just not represent granularity of the pile size. 

If we were to have a totally unbound sprite-based graphics system (and snowballs survive in the HFS), then we could have some sort of method of representing larger and larger piles of logs to represent whether we had 20kg or 50 kg or 200 kg of wood in one tile.  (Just imagine a sprite with one log, two logs, three logs to represent thirds of the tile dominated.)

Still, I think "my stockpile's tiles are 2/3s full" is a pretty good indication of how much wood you have.  Stockpiles are multi-tile affairs, anyway.

("What? Why did the Titan fit...'k'...oh, hes just 2,9m tall, the other one was 3,3m.").

 
I would think we wouldn't need to get that anal about it.  An 11-foot-tall creature can generally just stoop a little to get into a 10-foot-tall space.  We could just make all creatures of one species have a tile-occupancy based upon their average volume.  One of the advantages of the somewhat large 3m³ tile size is that almost every creature in the game fits into 27,000 liters of volume.  Even dragons are "only" 25,000 liters.  You'd only really have to be worried about declaring creatures excessively tall, like with a tree or the Bronze Colossus.  I'd imagine even it could crawl, but that might be a little much strain on poor Toady, who has been having trouble getting these things to work properly.

[noppa354]

if i can get toady's permission to noodle around with the code i may be able to make one part of this, multi-z-level trees and falling trees, if so, i'll make options "fell west" "fell north" etc.

Noppa354 the awesome is OUT!

[NW_Kohaku]

I wasn't aware that Toady was really farming out pieces of code.  I was under the impression that Baughn was a rare exception.

[JanusTwoface]

He isn't... And IIRC Baughn doesn't even have access to anything beyond the rendering code. Toady is the only one that has access to the core game.

So... not likely to happen.

[greenskye]

I've started a thread discussing a simpler solution to having units of material.

I specifically do NOT want to steal any discussion of a true volume and mass system in DF and will be directing people back here to discuss that if they desire. I merely wish to present an alternate solution for Toady's consideration.

An Alternative to Volume and Mass (Simple Units)

I wanted to let you know so that you were aware I was posting this.

[greenskye]

So in my brief attempt at another thread (swiftly picked apart by Kohaku) I tried to come up with a simpler method. I've changed my mind a bit about this. So I'd like to contribute to this thread on designing a way to present volume and mass to the player in a non-confusing method.


Quote of Kohaku's rebuttal:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Ideas like this actually came up frequently as common alternatives to the Volume and Mass suggestion I was pushing for earlier. 

What it comes down to, however, is that for either this or Volume and Mass's idea of precise units but fungible sizes of specific pieces of material, you need stacking first.

The reason we only get one log or one boulder now is that large item lists bloat the current item vector (although I do wish DF would move off of a vector and onto a container type that is more functional with large numbers of contained pointers) is that we simply cannot stack 10 wood planks as a single item times ten, we have to store them as ten individual items.

It's less a problem now that dwarves can collect from multiple piles, but the primary reason that this sort of suggestion wasn't acted upon before was that dwarves needed to collect items from multiple piles if they needed 5 units of wood planks or something.  Without stacking, this is still a problem. 


Mining: for mining, I think that a stone taking up 1/3rd of a tile might actually be easier (so 3 rubble or 2 rubble and one boulder with a possible giant boulder taking up 2 regular boulder's worth) than 7, and 7 is just the number we are most familiar with. 

For these, rubble (or gravel or whatever you want to call it) would best be handled with a generic non-ore rubble type and be capable of stacking with the rubble.

People have pointed out that ores should often be a type of gravel or rubble rather than a boulder, as well, which would be a typed distinctly (hematite rubble/gravel) before being worked. 

Sand is something we may want to consider more carefully.  While I'm all for having a fixed definition of how much sand is allowed in a tile, and making pickaxe mining a Non-Newtonian Fluid impossible, a blunt 7 units of sand per tile is exactly the sort of problem with item sizes that we're supposed to be moving away from, here.

The same goes for wood - part of the objective is to make trees of different sizes, which means more or less wood per tree, rather than a one-size-fits-all 7 wood.  This is especially important if we have tree farming later on with improved farming, and we have different "crop yields" in the tree farming.


Anyway, this whole thing came up pretty often in some flavor or another in the actual Volume and Mass thread, and I'll say here what I said there:

So long as there is stacking, there is NO FPS difference between having the game track "10 liters" or "7 kilograms" of wood and the game tracking "wood [5]".  Literally the only difference between a stack of one and a stack of the other is that in Volume and Mass, the units have a distinct name. 

For example, currently, metal ingots take up 2 liters.  So, a stack of "Iron bars [4]" is exactly the same thing as "Iron bars: 8 liters".  (Excepting, of course, that in this case, the unit of measure is half that of the other, but as long as stacks are nothing more than integers of a given unit size, that's largely irrelevant.)

So, basically, your "simpler" solution is actually no simpler at all.  The Volume and Mass idea is essentially the same thing, but with a name for the units that makes comparisons between different stacks easier. 


EDIT:

In fact, the common unit of measurement in the game (at least, the raws) is the cubic centimeter.  That is the unit used in [SIZE:whatever] in the creature raws.  It is probably also what is used in the hard-coded raws.  SIZE, which everything has defined, is just a cubic centimeter.

If we go by my calculations of a tile, we have [SIZE:27000000] in a tile.  Toady recently talked about a 2m*2m*3m tile for minecart physics, so that would translate into [SIZE:12000000] tiles.  If you just declare that a tile full of sand has 12000000 cubic centimeters of sand in it, you're pretty much done.  Again, this is the unit of measure the game already uses for everything, anyway, it just doesn't tell you outright yet. 

You just need to use a unit to display that volume, and liters (SIZE:1000, or 12000 liters per tile) would be an easier way of doing so.  Then, you can compare a liter of meat to a liter of wood to a liter of metal.

In this system, how does the player actually act? Does the game actually say that 1 chair requires 5.2 kilograms of wood? Does a hauler go find 5.2 kg of wood and haul it to the workshop?

For the player, what is the functional units? Do we try to be realistic and say that 1 arrow requires .2 kg of wood, 1 earring .02 kg of gold?

I would argue that that would be very confusing to keep track of, even with a good in-game interface for it. I think a nice, easy integer solution would be more accessible to more players, even if we sacrifice some realism.

[NW_Kohaku]

I would think it not be terribly confusing for the player to keep track of, provided it be kept to some general guidelines...

Stockpiles, for example, would have a defined limit to what will be in a tile - say, 3000 liters per tile, and a player could eyeball their wood stockpiles to get a decent sense of how much wood they have left over by counting how many tiles have wood in them (provided there are not so many different types of wood that occupy only part of a tile). 

Dwarves would take whatever arbitrary units of wood they take (like 50 liters of wood for a chair, for example) from the stockpile, and if they dump things off, they are merged with other wood into a stack, so that there are no "giant planks" or "small leftover bits".  Just wood (from specific trees).

Players probably won't care about the actual volumes of individual pieces.  They will be able to look at an item and see its absolute and comparative size, but right now, we already have defined volumes for every chair, table, earring, and other object in the game (except the tiles themselves).  You can derive them yourself from the material densities and the stated kilogram mass of each item.  Because of that, I derived the volumes of individual items in the game, like how metal bars are 2 liters, and boulders are (if memory serves) 50 liters. 

Players will, again, probably just care about the size of the stockpile, or what the stocks screen says about their remaining quantities of materials.

That said, it will have a more clear impact when we are talking about what players use in their crafts - when a gold earring takes up a completely negligible quantity of gold compared to a golden throne or golden statue, players are more likely to give metalsmiths plenty of practice on earrings.