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Guest Oaktoe

Dirt Tunnels,Foundations,and Basements

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    Dirt tunnels could follow the same rules as mining tunnels.Use your shovel on a dirt tile with the option to start a tunnel.A dirt tunnel could require 100 or more shovel actions to open the next tile since the digging action is faster than the mining action.Dirt tunnels could collapse sooner than a cave tile if not reinforced.A reinforced dirt wall could be destroyed with a lot of mining actions from a pickaxe(50-100?)to make it hard to tunnel into a deed(or see foundations).Could be useful to tunnel down to rock through dirt to start a mine or maybe mine out to the surface from inside a mine.

    Instead of finding ore like in mine tunnels you could find clay "veins" that would deplete after a couple thousand clay have been dug from them.You could also maybe find tar "veins" in the dirt too.

    Foundations could be introduced as a requirement for basements and as protection against someone tunneling into your house's basement or deed.You could create the foundation by right clicking the surface of a dirt tile with an active brick and select "create foundation".Could require bricks(collossus bricks?)and mortar to make.Foundations should be harder to make than tunnel reinforcements.

    Laying a foundation would prevent that tile from being dug into.It could only be bashed through with a maulor the like and has ql and takes damage like any other wall.If the foundation decays or is destroyed in a basement it could cave in like any other cave or dirt tunnel tile.

   

    Basements coupled with dirt tunnels could be useful to connect houses through tunnels or to a rock layer below a house to start a mine etc.Also with dirt tiles being dug out and collapsing theres a chance for dirt to be replinished like trees,rock,ore,and other renewable resources.

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1+

But i don't think this is on Rolf's top priorities list right now, possibly as the technology may be a bit hard but i support the idea.

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I'm going to go all Vietcong on you.

  Lol,climbing trees is already in the works supposedly.

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sounds like a great idea to have tunnels like that, you could pretty much make a basement below your home that way with the entrance to it being right next to your home, that would be great stuff.

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I like the idea of being able to dig a pit  under a building  or  create a "hobbit hole" type structure by  digging a depreson or trench and caping it with a house/roof that looks like a little grass hill,  would make a nice root celar too.

another way to create poor man tunnels in covered trenches

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Unfortunately this is pretty impossible with the way the engine works unless you make another layer on top of the mine and world layers purely for dirt tunnels, which is not really feasible.

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Just realized with this idea it would also be possible to make ghetto bridges.

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Just realized with this idea it would also be possible to make ghetto bridges.

Who needs bridges when you got tunnels?

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Unfortunately this is pretty impossible with the way the engine works unless you make another layer on top of the mine and world layers purely for dirt tunnels, which is not really feasible.

no need for an extra layer if you are digging into the dirt layer. Freedom has a very thick dirt layer so it can work just fine there (not so on Wild I would guess). Digging just needs to be slightly changed for the cases when you would dig down and there is a tunnel directly below you and such things.

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Can't quite imagine this working. Tunnels and terrain are two entirely different systems. It's quite the miracle that we don't really notice how rough the transition between the two really is.

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It could work as easily as mines do.

It's just dirt is much easier to terraform, which makes a lot of problems arise.

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Nice idea but would not be easy to implement. Maybe after bridges though  :P

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In a way FM and Elias are both right.

I'm going to attempt to explain why this is harder than it seems. Please...anyone more savvy in how to describe this please do so. And of course, I might be 100% wrong on this, but I've worked with other engines like this before and they have the exact same issues and behaviors.

The Wurm engine isn't really 3D like most recent 3D games. It has more in common with the Doom engine than anything else that comes to mind. It is really 2D (the big grid you see highlighted) that is rendered in 3D, and some of the game mechanics (like speed, height advantage, climbing slopes, falling etc) using a stored height for some calculations.

That is why you never see anything directly over something else (like someone on a roof), likely why jumping isn't possible, why collision isn't enforced and why the much desired two-story buildings and bridges pose such a nasty problem.

Mines workaround that problem by a nifty trick. They do not actually occupy the same world-space. They are their own little world that is carefully connected to the surface layer at mine openings and share data with the main world space when necessary. So if your mine travels under my forge....you are not actually under me when I am hammering away. You are in an entirely different world space than I am, but the two are connected and maintaining the illusion (you are in my local for instance).

To allow dirt tunnels, you'd have to set up the same system, but with the added complexity of being fixed both above (the surface height of a given tile) and below (the height of the rock layer) requiring three world spaces to share data seamlessly.

It is a cool idea, and I hope Rolf considers it when he starts adding in world layers for bridges or 2nd stories.

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I would say that with the current game, all the stuff being made and the depression we are in, it will definitely take a good few years for this to appear on the list.

But the good news is that the computer gets twice as powerful and twice as cheap to produce every 2 years, so eventually i think it will happen.

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I would say that with the current game, all the stuff being made and the depression we are in, it will definitely take a good few years for this to appear on the list.

But the good news is that the computer gets twice as powerful and twice as cheap to produce every 2 years, so eventually i think it will happen.

Getting the different "world spaces" to work together isn't really a performance-related programming issue. The problem is the sheer complexity in maintaining the illusion of connectivity between the worlds, to use Othobs words.

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+1

This is a really neat idea.

But how about you find coal, salt and maybe other veins when you dig through dirt?

Implementation?:

You get the same dig option as normal but another (always Dig at the top and under the mouse) which specifies Tunnel.

Tunneling requires three Tunnel Props (carpentry) to be in your inventory in order to prop the tunnel up.

Tunnel Props decay like items in an undeeded mine (approx lifetime two real months?). 'One' of them vanishing would collapse the tile. Could be implemented like normal tile collapse in mines but faster.

Tunnels themselves get implemented in exactly the same way as mines, ie as an extra layer in the world geography which 'coexists' with the normal land layer.

You can mine out of a Tunnel onto a dirt tile if there is no vegetation on it.

Mining from a dirt Tunnel into rock would require a Mine Support to be in your inventory.

Mining from a dirt Tunnel into rock would create an entree at the angle you mined in at (ie not always a downslope on entry).

PvP issues? Watch your backs all of you, this would make for some really exciting sapper projects :D

Potential besides making it a bit easier to find mine entrances on Freedom? How about undersea tunnels?

Dirt tunnels should only ever be allowed to be one tile wide to reflect the greater difficulty of digging into earth and supporting it.

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Undersea tunnels would mean extensive modification to the Water Layer, so it can go up and down in these tunnels.

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Undersea tunnels would mean extensive modification to the Water Layer, so it can go up and down in these tunnels.

Actually it only means that when you go below sea level you are not absolutely going to be under water.

Man if things worked that way IRL we wouldnt have the Clyde Tunnel :D

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Just realized with this idea it would also be possible to make ghetto bridges.

Who needs bridges when you got tunnels?

one begets the other. ;D

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I like the idea overall... but like it was said it's really hard to implement...

I belive Wurm needs to switch to full 3D.

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Wurm cannot switch to full 3D without becoming a new game and becoming even harder to render.

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I like the idea overall... but like it was said it's really hard to implement...

I belive Wurm needs to switch to full 3D.

No, all they would need to do is make the dirt layer act as the rock layer when you are using a certain action.

Boom, it creates a "cave" but instead of cave walls and veins, it's dirt walls and other veins.

Both layers are pretty much exactly the same, the only difference is texture, and the ability to freely terraform.

The only problem would be restricting digging ontop of the caves, which could screw up terraforming - and limiting how deep you can dig the tunnel based on the rock layer, which could be calculated from the tunnels entrance.

If you cannot dig around the tunnel, then the exact depth of the rock layer compared to the dirt tunnel doesn't matter, because you cannot expose it to compare.

I can see places where there can be serious issues with this method though, I'm just describing a simple way of doing it.

We all know simple never works :P

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