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[Sadrice]

if water levels were floating point numbers, i dont think you would see the weird wandering units of water traveling across a body of water that you are adding to.  if you add a lot of water (draining something into a cave lake, for instance), you will see whole flocks of units of water moving in synchrony, wandering about, trying to find a lower level to disperse to.  if they were floats, they would even out and homogenize, making a flat 3.2/7 water level, instead of 3/7 with one in five tiles occupied by a semirandomly moving 4/7.

[Uristocrat]

3/7 is not always 3/7 though.

Create a 2x2 bath, fill it with a pond zone until all the tiles show 6/7.  Then enlarge it by 4 tiles so that everything reads 3/7.  Even though all 8 tiles read 3/7,  you'll find that you can't path through it until at least one of the tiles drops to 2/7.  Usually by digging out a 9th square.  That happens to me often enough in 31.18 and 31.25 that there's definitely something strange.

Which is why I say that the bath should have 2/7 in at least one tile and 2/7 or 3/7 in all the other tiles.

(My theory is that water levels are actually calculated as floating point numbers, and 3/7 can be anything from 3.0 up to 3.4.  Because all the tiles read 3/7, but the dwarves won't cross.)

You might have to wait for water to stop sloshing about in that case.  You might have water sloshing around for a while leaving you with 4/7 in one place and 2/7 in another.  I know for a fact that all my bathtubs, in which I have at a steady 3/7 in every square, do not cause pathing issues.  I can also almost guarantee that water level is an integer.  I think Toady packs it into 4 bits, to pack the values tightly and save on memory.  A look at the source code to dfliquids would probably confirm that one way or the other.

[Halnoth]

If you want a working pump bath design I make one in almost all my forts now after the success of my first endeavor. You can find the plans on this thread http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=69751.15

[Disquiet]

The last time I tried to create an automated dwarf bathing system failed miserably. Unless something about blood has changed since .12, attempting to bath dwarves results in endless duplication of blood creating a massive bloody torrent instead of cleaning anyone.

My system had a waterfall going through grates on the entrance to my dining room. I would NOT recommend this as it is simply a blood production machine. If anyone figures out a cleaning system that actually works I'd be interested.

[Halnoth]

The last time I tried to create an automated dwarf bathing system failed miserably. Unless something about blood has changed since .12, attempting to bath dwarves results in endless duplication of blood creating a massive bloody torrent instead of cleaning anyone.

My system had a waterfall going through grates on the entrance to my dining room. I would NOT recommend this as it is simply a blood production machine. If anyone figures out a cleaning system that actually works I'd be interested.

I just posted one.

[Girlinhat]

Water (and magma) is NOT a floating point.  It is, in fact, a bit (or is it a byte?  I think it's a bit...).  Water goes so high as 7/7 because that's 8 values, 1-7 and "dry" 0.  This means that every tile on the map has a single bit attached to it, determining what depth of water it's at from 0-7, and a Boolean for water/magma.  At least, I suspect the boolean.  It would only need to determine "this is water, or this is magma" and wouldn't need to state "this is dry".  0/7 water and 0/7 magma are both dry, so a distinction in the type of dryness would be moot.  Either way, it's somewhat well known that fluid level is a bit because this leads to very clean memory mapping.

[Sadrice]

A bit is just a 0 or a 1, encoding two possibilities.  A byte is eight of those, encoding 2^8, or 256 possibilities.  To have exactly eight possible values you need 3 bits, because 8 = 2^3.  I suspect he uses four bits, sometimes called a nybble, with the fourth bit as a boolean, specifying water/magma, as you hypothesized.