43 – Stocking some piles, part 1

Let me start again by congratulating Irrlicht on being random. I was loading some textures, and I accidentally deleted a few of them. So what does a responsible little toolkit do? Drop FPS by about 70 of course. I can understand not showing an error or something, but dropping performance like this is very silly. *whine* *whine* *whine*

So in this short series I will be demonstrating the final implementation for stockpiles, followed by another short series for buildings. And after I will post an updated feature set for version 0.1, complete with color coding and progress report so I can see how close I am to the release feature wise. Some of the content in this series will be familiar, some new.

The new inspection panel plays a big part here, so let me show it first. Here we see it in action showing the information for a single floor tile:

We see the current coordinates, a preview of the floor, a description, the type of the material and the current grass coverage. Now I'll cut down a tree and see what the panel shows:

Nothing ground breaking here: we are informed that we have 5 pine logs and that there is a trunk in the cell. The interesting part comes when we involve stockpiles.

But before, I would like to talk about a change in the stockpile system that might turn out to be quite controversial. I've decided to make stockpiles nontraversable. A dwarf will no longer be able to enter the cell occupied by a stockpile, the same as if they try to enter a cell with a solid obstacle, like a wall. There is no technical limitation for this decision and in the past stockpiles were traversable. I just grew tired of the way stockpiles are set up usually: a huge rectangular sea of stuff. This change should lead to more interesting stockpile shapes and change the way you structure your fortress.

Back to wood stockpiles:

First the panel is informing us that we have a wood stockpile with 5 logs inside. Then, it tells us exactly what kind of logs: 5 pine logs. Let us cut down an oak:

As expected, we now have 5 pine logs and 5 oak logs in the stockpile. One more tree, this time a willow:

Just as expected! A wood stockpile can only hold 12 logs. The remaining 3 logs are still in their original cell:

Of course, you can create larger sections of wood stockpiles, but if you are not careful, since stockpiles are nontraversable, you can waste area if you create rectangular ones:

The to stockpiles in the middle are not reachable, so we wasted two squares there. Another thing to notice is that the panel grows to accommodate all content.

So now we can easily tell what logs are in a single pile. And no, I will not differentiate logs from different trees visually. Maybe sometime in the far future. But how can we get an overview of all our resources? Surely clicking on each stockpile is not that efficient. This is where the item browser comes in:

By browsing the appropriate tab, we see our total stockpiles of logs, together with small icons and color coding.

That's it for wood stockpiles. Join me next time for food stockpiles, which are surprisingly a lot more complicated.

So now that you read that, what do you think? I tried to make the system as easy to use as possible, especially for people who are not that happy with the way stockpiles work in other games and how involved the process can be.