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[tfaal]

I personally don't mind the tall ceilings. I like to imagine my squares as D&D style five foot cubes; quite comfortable for a dwarf or elf, but rather cramped for a human. Naturally, this makes the castle towers somewhat ridiculous, and if multi-storey buildings get added those would be borked too, but each scale has its problems.

[Footkerchief]

Just out of curiosity, why not have roof walkers? Sure it's unrealistic, but a night creature that jumps from roof to roof would easily allow him to sneak into buildings, and would make the battle more interesting, do you chose to stand your ground? or do you chose to dodge and chance a fall. Additionally a group of bandits that have set up a small camp or some random cache would make it just as interesting as the sewers.

It's fine to have creatures walking on roofs sometimes.  I think what Toady was getting at was that 1-tile-high buildings leave many roofs at ground level (on slopes), which makes roof access too easy and commonplace.

[freeformschooler]

Plus, bigger buildings can always mean more floors (like 40d!) in the future.

[monk12]

Just out of curiosity, why not have roof walkers? Sure it's unrealistic, but a night creature that jumps from roof to roof would easily allow him to sneak into buildings, and would make the battle more interesting, do you chose to stand your ground? or do you chose to dodge and chance a fall. Additionally a group of bandits that have set up a small camp or some random cache would make it just as interesting as the sewers.

It's fine to have creatures walking on roofs sometimes.  I think what Toady was getting at was that 1-tile-high buildings leave many roofs at ground level (on slopes), which makes roof access too easy and commonplace.

This is how I interpreted it as well. It's one thing for adventurers and bandits and creatures of the night prowling the rooftops, it is quite another for those same rooftops to be the neighborhood shortcut. If nothing else, the owner of the house would take measures to keep people from tramping over it all day and all night.

[irdsm]

Would you care to share any of the more amusing town embark mishaps you've come across, Toady? From the sounds of it some of them come out a little...wonky 

Really really looking forward to this next update.

[nil]

This is how I interpreted it as well. It's one thing for adventurers and bandits and creatures of the night prowling the rooftops, it is quite another for those same rooftops to be the neighborhood shortcut. If nothing else, the owner of the house would take measures to keep people from tramping over it all day and all night.

Although, in the long run, I'd love to see sufficient randomized cultural variation to permit this norm to be occasionally subverted.

[Vattic]

I have spent most of my childhood in a 400 years-old house with the ground at roof level on the rear and left side, and a slope on the right. The walls were mostly made of stones approximately 60cm, 20 cm and 30cm of length, width and depth respectively. This house used to be the servants' quarters back then, and a few centuries before, the building it was built onto was a stable.

So nope, it was done at that time. It's not the most likely to be found, but it was lovely. Only bad sides were that it was litterally freezing inside in winter (it turns out having a few tons of wet soil behind a stone wall does not help with humidity either). Oh, and the walls slowly curved and will probably keep on for only a few decades now.
Good sides : temperature was perfect in summer.

Fair enough but I doubt it was ever as common as it is in the released shots and Toady even mentioned a problem it causes in the shape of accessible rooves. A prime example of what I mean can be found just up from the centre in this shot. The road to the left dips for just one tile length to allow for this shop and I can't help but think it likely that they'd of put the shop on the level above with perhaps a basement bellow. I only wanted to know if Toady plans on doing more than just cutting into the terrain when it comes to landscaping for cities. I hope I'm not coming across as too critical I'm just eager to see things nicely polished.

[tps12]

Diagonal movements take the same time as movements along an axis, so tiles aren't even square.

Nope. Diagonal movement takes 1.41 times as long.

This is often asserted, but I have never seen it confirmed. I came to my conclusion by running around in arena mode with a stopwatch, but perhaps my experimental design was flawed.

[nogoodnames]

Diagonal movements take the same time as movements along an axis, so tiles aren't even square.

Nope. Diagonal movement takes 1.41 times as long.

This is often asserted, but I have never seen it confirmed. I came to my conclusion by running around in arena mode with a stopwatch, but perhaps my experimental design was flawed.

A more accurate experiment would be to start an adventure and count how many steps it takes for a time related announcement such as "It is noon." to appear. Of course this would be very tedious.

[Footkerchief]

Diagonal movements take the same time as movements along an axis, so tiles aren't even square.

Nope. Diagonal movement takes 1.41 times as long.

This is often asserted, but I have never seen it confirmed. I came to my conclusion by running around in arena mode with a stopwatch, but perhaps my experimental design was flawed.

All you have to do is search Toady's post history for 'diagonal':

movement uses standard euclidean distances when calculating times (ie, it root 2's the diagonal)

Anyway, yeah, diagonal moves take longer, by approximately 362/256.  The actual step times are only 10 or so, which doesn't multiply up very well, so there are some random elements to get it back to around 362/256, ostensibly, on average.

[tomblifter]

On the topic of movement; Will creatures with different movement patterns (leaping across squares, for example), and jumping skill for playable characters be added (Jumping 1-2 squares over a a gap, or jumping out of hiding in order to ambush)?

[Knight Otu]

On the topic of movement; Will creatures with different movement patterns (leaping across squares, for example), and jumping skill for playable characters be added (Jumping 1-2 squares over a a gap, or jumping out of hiding in order to ambush)?

Jumping and climbing are planned for the future.

# Movement

    * Improved swimming (holding breath, currents, etc.)
    * Ability to climb in adv mode
    * Ability to jump in adv mode

There's no telling when it might come, especially as Toady has mentioned potential creature pathfinding problems with regards to jumping. Some sponsorship animals might want jumping and climbing, but if it's too much to code, it won't go in despite that.

[tomblifter]

Jumping and climbing are planned for the future.

# Movement

    * Improved swimming (holding breath, currents, etc.)
    * Ability to climb in adv mode
    * Ability to jump in adv mode

That's coo-

There's no telling when it might come, especially as Toady has mentioned potential creature pathfinding problems with regards to jumping. Some sponsorship animals might want jumping and climbing, but if it's too much to code, it won't go in despite that.

And now I'm sad.

[tps12]

All you have to do is search Toady's post history for 'diagonal':

movement uses standard euclidean distances when calculating times (ie, it root 2's the diagonal)

Ooh, nice, thanks. I guess arena (and adventure?) mode must limit the simulation steps based on the player's movement speed, so when I was running diagonally it just ran more steps per second.

An improved experiment would use a slower creature as a control: if a half-speed human can take as many steps in a real-time minute as a regular human then you can't compare elapsed wall times.

[Areyar]

Sorry, I'm going to ask a question pertaining to the devlog...


About this dead-popcap, if unlikely, I can imagine it could become a problem if someone wishes to run history for 10000 years or so.

When a site reaches this cap, how will the dead be culled?
Will it simply not add new corpses, or will it use the FIFO-system removing an old corpse for each new entry?
Will there be some sort of weighing? (Not realistic maybe, but heck) e.g. corpses of important figures last longer than 'generic cheesemaker's corpse'.

You will likely have very extensive catacombs when the mentioned cap is reached though....possibly nobody will notice anymore at some point. But might for historical figures sooner than for peasants.