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[Solace]

Clever thread title? Borg reference? Anyone? ... guess not. Anyway, this idea came to me in another thread, but I kind of wanted to expand it out, so here goes.

Water is represented in sevenths, right? And someone already suggested making sand a 7/7 deal, so it can flow. However, thinking about it more and more, a lot of physical stuff in DF could be represented in about the same way. I know Toady is already trying to work on water-mixing, but this is a lot easier, because even if you have different layers, they don't mix. You could, hypothetically, have 2/7 sand and 2/7 water, but there's no issue with taking away one of those, and expecting it to be 50/50, since you can take just the sand or just the water.

So, what else could be measured in 7ths? Rubble, for one. After a cave in, 4/7 or greater would be completely blocked off (although only 7/7 would prevent water or such from flowing through), whereas 1/7 or 3/7 would only slow the dwarves down, until it was cleared.
This could also be used during mining, to deal with the whole "somehow the stone has been atomized" issue. Mining would require a few diggers and a few haulers, or heck... mining carts, to mass-transport large quantities at once? Who doesn't love mine carts.
Could also be a part of ore or gem gathering. Gems could be 1/7 actual gems, 6/7 the surrounding rock. Ores or even rock types could also be mixed.

For that matter, rather than the weird twilight world of floors now, where the sort of exist as nothing or something a bit at random, floors could be just a 1/7 layer to walk over, which would also make that nice gold floor off in the middle of nowhere movable. Or better yet, "regular" floors could just be the layer below, but if you wanted a "walkway" floor hanging over nothing, that'd take a 1/7 of something.

And, of course, sand makes a good 7/7, credit to the first guy who suggested it. But that means that soil is also a 7/7, which means that getting soil underground could be a much easier matter of just dragging a single unit of soil over, like the "bucket brigade" watering.
For that matter, different things could require different amounts of soil. Maybe fungus needs only 1/7 soil, but a root-plant needs 3/7 soil, and trees need a full 7/7 soil, IE the layer under them has to be soil.

Stockpiles could also be in 7ths, although possibly different items would take up more or less space. A few rings make up 1/7, but a bed takes up 4/7.
Workshop clutter, too. Now, if you leave a pile of stuff around, the workshop gets "cluttered" semi-arbitrarily. But if those things take up actual space, the workshop might be cluttered by being physically covered in stuff you didn't haul away.

Now, as far as CPU power goes, aside from maybe the sand, there'd be no actual calculations beside the existing "no longer connected to the ground" one. It wouldn't lag like water because it wouldn't move around, it'd just use an existing system to make it easier to implement.

[sockless]

The main problem I see with this is that it'd make an ugly game, since you'd have numbers all over the place.

[Lex Talionias]

that would be a good calculation system if this game had better visuals. right now you just described a headache for player and programmer alike.

though for farming i likes that idea as well as having 6/7 rock slides that could slow water flow decently.

[Solace]

Well, it's not like everything needs to have a number plastered on it. Water moves around all the time so you need to know how it's moving, but for a rock slide, that could be part of the mouseover or something.

[NW_Kohaku]

Although this focuses more upon display, you might look at the Volume and Mass thread, if you haven't already.

Sevenths are only used because of the 3-bit memory conserving trick Toady used.  He might eventually use a different metric, although the most logical, tenths, wouldn't be plainly visible in the standard Curses psuedo-ASCII, since 10 would need to be one character.

What this really needs, however, is a way for the information to be displayed to the player without just cycling through flashing one digit after another.

[thijser]

Can't we just show the top layer and paint the background in the colour of the second layer?

[NW_Kohaku]

You wouldn't really be able to tell the difference between 1/7 water and 1/7 sand, which dwarves would path through, and 1/7 water and 6/7 sand, which is impassible if you only showed the top one.

Plus, if sand is multiple different colors, including black...

Really, I think that at some point, DF just plain becomes limited by the interface choice of psuedo-ASCII, and a 256 character limit.  As far as I can tell, I don't think it's ever going to break free of that tether.

[Solace]

Well, you could prioritize showing whatever's most relevant; physically blocked off areas show as that, rather than water (6 sand and 1 water shows as 6 sand, even if water's "on top"). Or show the total amount of "stuff", but color it as what it's most (6 sand and 1 water shows as 7 sand). The best choice would probably be just to have it cycle- 1 water, 6 sand, 1 water, 6 sand.

On the flipside, intentionally mixing a large amount of the stuff could get confusing. One of every type of sand or soil on the same space, for example. Although I guess that could be a sort of incentive to keep things tidy, if it bothers you. I don't think you'd often want to mix several kinds of things onto the same space, though. More a situation of, oh no, the roof over my stockpile collapsed, and now all my stuff is mixed in with rubble and sand and water! I must fix this!

As far as the looks goes, yeah, eventually I hope we can have a lot more characters, and an official graphics pack.

[NW_Kohaku]

I've thought on this, and think you could potentially show the required data to the player in a grid format, but it would still require breaking the ASCII-style format.

If we assume that the standard tile is 16x16 (even though it isn't...), and we want 7s, then we can have at most 2 pixels to each layer.  Depending on how we want to change the graphics system, you could either have a stack of 1 to 7 bars as different icons, with these bars color-coded, which requires having the game dynamically color different pieces of an icon.  2 (normal) sand and 3 water means 2 yellow bars and 3 blue bars with 2 black/empty bars at the top.  Magma and red sand and any other liquids and other partials would need to be kept very distinct.  (Or maybe all sand turns yellow in those views?)

Alternately, we could just use "graphics support" on the thing, and try to have something like an image of water level rising (a wave with just blue underneath it), sand as a slightly pile-like object, and whatever else.  We could either try to stack icons over one another, so that 2/7 sand takes up the bottom 2/7ths of the tile (front layer), while 3 water takes up 5/7ths of the tile (but is behind the sand icon, so it overlaps, and appears to only take up 3/7ths of the tile), and the rest of the tile is empty.

[Draco18s]

Really all this suggestion does is multiply the number of z-levels by 7 and require that dwarves dig through 7 of them at a time.

This really isn't efficient.  And its come up before.

[NW_Kohaku]

Perhaps, but granularity of units in general is a troubling aspect of this game.  Too large a grain makes meaningful distinction between one item and another similar item almost impossible.  (And this game has a flood of objects with meaningless distinctions between them.)

[Draco18s]

True.

But more z-level distinction will only have the opposite problem.  Too small of a grain for meaningful distinction.

[Solace]

Well, the whole point is that it's not any different from the system as it is now. You wouldn't "see" every block in the game as a 7/7 of itself, only things that can be (and have been) broken up into parts. It wouldn't mess with pathing, or require a lot more moving up and down to see different z levels, or require a way to show things taller than a z-level. You won't have rooms with the floor a half-level above the floor of another room, and require half-stairs to pass between them.

You also wouldn't need a completely comprehensive solution for every possible permutation of stuff, just the few that you'll need to see at a glance. Any physical objects are important because 4/7 blocks the path, and maybe 1-3/7 slows you down, but it doesn't need to cycle through 1/7 of every color of sand, for example. It could just cycle through the layer of "physical stuff", shown as whatever the top thing is, and water/magma.

The sand wouldn't necessarily even have to show up as actually 1/7, I mean, look at what Ironhand did with the seven kinds of water. You could have just three "versions" of granular materials, one for 1-3 (passable but inconvenient), 4-6 (impassable, but water ect could flow through), and one for a full block of the stuff.

[Draco18s]

Alright, take this then:

In one tile I have only a floor.  In the next I have 1/7 of rock, lets say.  In the next, 2/7.  In the next, 3/7 and so on.

To us, in the real world, this would make a ramp.  In the way your suggestion works we'd have a walkable tile, 3 'hard to move in' tiles, followed by 4 impassable tiles (the last one of which has a floor for the level above.

Also, the memory requirement of this suggestion is not merely even double what we have now.

No, its more.

1) you need a flag for the material type.
2) you need an indication for how much of that material.
3) repeat until no more materials.

Currently we have a tile material type ("granite","chalk",etc.), plus a fluid type (1 bit, water or magma), and an amount (3 bits, 0-7).

[Solace]

Alright, sure, so a 3/7 counts as empty and a 4/7 counts as full. Not like that's the only bit of technical weirdness in the game, like stairs that can either be a thing or lack of thing, and give you or not give you stone when destroyed. Short things can wade through 3/7 water and tall things can't wade through 4/7 water. A kitten takes up an entire tile, and a dragon doesn't spill over into nearby tiles. Mining out gold gives you a free gold floor, destroying that gives you nothing, and replacing it takes gold ore, which you can then recover if it gets destroyed a second time.

As far as memory goes, it'd be a rare occurrence (except maybe sand, which might happen anyway), and not take up more space than a stockpile with up to seven things in it. A full 7/7 of the same material (or possibly similar materials) can probably be simplified into a block of the same material, at least until it has to be moved.