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[Libelnon]

Bear with me a moment, but I'm not so good at explaining things.
At the moment, a common flat embark is composed of the ground layer, and then 15+ z-levels above, and a dwarf can only occupy 1 z-level, right?
Well, here's a thought. Why not expand land so it can be smoother, and water flows across it more smoothly? My thoughts here are to cut each land section into 7 layers as well, and allow the player to scroll through these. Brooks can actually be only 1-2 layers deep, like they would be in reality, and rolling hills can be created on embark. So, a dwarf now occupies 7 z-levels, or a fraction of that relates to how tall a dwarf is, and we work with it that way?
Your thoughts, people?

[Silverionmox]

Displaying it would be a pain. Determining how high creatures are vs their surroundings can be a pain too (eg. a dwarf stands on a square with height 2 while adjacent to him is a silk sock on a square with height 5. Can he grab it?)

Besides being a logical step, it carries a lot of disadvantages, not the least of which is the hassle of updating almost every game interaction. And if that doesn't happen it wouldn't be worthwhile anyway.

For brooks there are other potential solutions, like using the floor cover tile on its own as a floor tile, without requiring water to be under it in worldgen. In addition, ramps could be considered half full instead of completely full, so they too can serve as shallow start points for brooks.

Lastly, check out the Depth by Darkening thread. When that is in, you'll be able to see and enjoy more of the already existing terrain. There is terrain variety now, it's just poorly displayed.

[NW_Kohaku]

Actually, this was covered in Volume and Mass as well, when I was talking about how large tiles are if we think of them as cubes.  (Which must then be at least 10' tall because that is the standard "story" height.)

Basically, the problem then became having a 100-square-foot (1000 cubic foot) tile, which is friggin' huge.

The alternative is to make 5' cubes (or some similar smaller cut), and then make every floor multiple z-levels tall.

This is especially relevant to Volume and Mass because if we are slicing tiles vertically this thin, we now have to recognize how many tiles tall a dwarf or any other creature is, making them all multi-tile creatures, which in turn means we have to make multi-tile creatures, and finally declare the size of a creature within a tile.

[Libelnon]

multi-tile creatures would be a more accurate representation of size, though. I don't think a whale is actually smaller than a wagon.

[Silverionmox]

It's pretty simple to decide what the standard is: a tile is the cube circumscribed around a dwarf. Presumably then long humanoids can walk in 1-square tunnels crouched (with all the disadvantages that implies). Dwarves, kobolds, short goblins can run freely. Which makes sense, they're the underground dwellers after all: they would be 1 square. I tend to see the long humanoids as two squares in height in that scheme. So a square would be appr. 1 m³. That's 150 liters per level, and that means 15 buckets. Workable.

[NW_Kohaku]

It's pretty simple to decide what the standard is: a tile is the cube circumscribed around a dwarf. Presumably then long humanoids can walk in 1-square tunnels crouched (with all the disadvantages that implies). Dwarves, kobolds, short goblins can run freely. Which makes sense, they're the underground dwellers after all: they would be 1 square. I tend to see the long humanoids as two squares in height in that scheme. So a square would be appr. 1 m³. That's 150 liters per level, and that means 15 buckets. Workable.

Please actually read the Volume and Mass thread and post there if you are talking about that thread...

Again, standard story height, for a human building to be two-story, and have each story be exactly one z-level above the other, would require a 10-foot vertical spacing between z-levels.  Dwarves might require slightly shorter (being 6/7ths the volume and mass of humans), but we can assume similar scales, especially if you have to buttress a stone floor.

10 feet also almost perfectly matches 3 meters.  3 meters cube makes for 27 cubic meters, or 27,000 liters of volume.

1 cubic meter is simply far too small for a dwarf.  Yes, they are "dwarves", but they aren't LESS THAN HALF the height of a human, especially since a human is comfortable in a 1-z tall house with another floor 1-z level above him.

Dwarves are defined in the raws as, on average, 60,000 ml of volume (and humans 70,000 ml).  All organic tissue appears to have a density of 1 kg/l or 1000 kg/m³ (and kg/m³ perfectly matches the standard Toady has set for density in the raws, and all references to SIZE imply consistantly that it is measured in ml, density in kg/m³, and mass in kg.

Wagons are defined as having a volume of a laughably small 12 liters (although, presumably, as a container, may take up more area than that implies).  Whales are defined as 20,000 liters.