Improve Cliff-related wall placement/visualization

Oktokolo · Post by **Oktokolo** » Sat Jan 13, 2018 4:32 pm

What ?

: walls and cliffs connectivity.png (141.74 KiB) Viewed 3787 times

Why ?

Walls that connect to adjacent cliffs would look prettier. They would also indicate better, whether there is an actual hole between the wall and the cliff.
Walkable space that can't be closed with a wall are surprising for the user in a bad way and inconsistent with general behaviour of walls.
Tile-sized non-walkable space wich looks like it should be walkable (and accept walls) also surpises the user in a bad way and looks ugly if the end point of a wall.

Tekky · Post by **Tekky** » Sat Jan 13, 2018 5:40 pm

Yes, I fully agree. This inconsistency certainly needs fixing.

Tekky · Post by **Tekky** » Thu Feb 01, 2018 8:51 pm

I really like it that it now is possible to use cliffs as a natural wall, so walling off your base requires only half the amount of actual wall.

However, the more I use this new possibility, the more annoying it gets that you sometimes can't fill the gap to a diagonal cliff.

Also, as the OP (original poster) pointed out, the graphics does not always correspond to the actual collision-box.

mp0011 · Post by **mp0011** » Thu Feb 01, 2018 9:19 pm

There are deffinitelly more things, that should have special behaviour when placed on the bottom cliff tile.
Walls blended into mountain are perfect examples. Gates should also merge with the cliffs.

Here's proposition for pipes and belts. viewtopic.php?f=6&t=57356

Other entities are eg.
- electric poles (small and medium), that mounted on the cliff side are just wire insulators mounted directly to the rock.
- lights, mounted on the cliff side may have differently shaped light cone (only to one direction), and different look (wall-mounted light)
- Same for rail signals
- Chests, looking like vertical hatches to deposits embedded into mountain

<NO_NAME> · Post by **<NO_NAME>** » Tue Feb 20, 2018 11:43 am

We definitely need that. Often you can't place wall close enough to a cliff to block passage. It is a real pain to try to connect them.

JimBarracus · Post by **JimBarracus** » Wed Feb 21, 2018 8:32 am

On the other side I don't like how walls interact with water.
It doesn't make sense that the walls connect to the water.

I liked that you could build a wall directly in the water replacing the natural coast. That's gone with the new land generation.

Tekky · Post by **Tekky** » Wed Feb 28, 2018 12:17 pm

Here is another thread related to graphical issues with cliffs:
viewtopic.php?f=58&t=54550 [16.0] Cliff bounding box / sprite overlap

I believe that at least the issue of gaps in walls that biters can pathfind through is not intended behavior. Therefore, I have filed a bug report on that issue:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=58273 unable to connect walls to diagonal cliffs

It would also be nice if the graphical issues that the OP mentioned were fixed. However, I did not mention those in my bug report, because I do not believe that they qualify as bugs.

Tekky · Post by **Tekky** » Thu Mar 15, 2018 12:29 pm

According to my bug report thread, the issue of unsealable gaps between cliffs and walls will be adressed in 0.16.31.

As already stated, the other issues reported by the OP are not part of my bug report thread, though. I did not report them, because I wouldn't classify them as bugs, but rather suggestions.

Oktokolo · Post by **Oktokolo** » Thu Mar 15, 2018 6:08 pm

Tekky wrote:According to my bug report thread, the issue of unsealable gaps between cliffs and walls will be adressed in 0.16.31.
As already stated, the other issues reported by the OP are not part of my bug report thread, though. I did not report them, because I wouldn't classify them as bugs, but rather suggestions.

Good news. And all the oddities regarding cliffs and walls are rather obvious. So they will probably just fix them all too. It is not like they could play test using walls next to cliffs without stumbling noticing them...

Tekky · Post by **Tekky** » Tue Mar 20, 2018 9:05 pm

Meanwhile, the issue of diagonal walls leaving a gap when connecting to cliffs is mostly fixed. It seems to be no longer possible for biters to pathfind through that gap. However, in certain situations, it is still possible for the player to move through that gap. See my bug report thread for further information.

For single player games, I guess that the remaining gap is not much of an issue, since biters seem unable to pathfind through the gap. However, for PvP games, I guess it could be a serious problem if it is possible for players to simply walk through the walls of their opponent's base.

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