Dock Placement

[Brightgalrs]

Dock placement seems a bit picky. It seems that it only allows a little part of the dock to extend into the water. How about as long as the dock is touching land it can be placed?

[Pureon]

Yep that was discussed in the Build Limits / Restrictions topic. We've discussed this further on IRC and the guys are now working on a placement restriction similar to what you describe. Some maps, like Belgian bog, do not often have a coastline on which the building can sit (it's a marsh/bog thing), so this needs to be worked out. Also some docks are much larger than others (see super_dock on svn), so this makes placement even trickier.

See here for some further discussion.

[Mythos_Ruler]

Also, it seems now that buildings can't be placed in water, even if that water is 1 millimeter deep and invisible to the player.

[Pureon]

Also, it seems now that buildings can't be placed in water, even if that water is 1 millimeter deep and invisible to the player.

historic_bruno and i discussed making docks buildable down to walking depth - would that be too deep for standard buildings?

[theShadow]

it seems like it would make the most sense to just be able to place a dock in such a way that it is all in the water, and is touching a coastline.

[SMST]

It seems absolutely reasonable to me that Docks cannot be constructed on environments such as the Belgian Bog.

[Mythos_Ruler]

It seems absolutely reasonable to me that Docks cannot be constructed on environments such as the Belgian Bog.

Agreed. I see no reason to optimize placement for such maps--only for situations where it is clear we want naval action (e.g. Gambia River, Cycladic Archipelago, Miletus, et al.).

[historic_bruno]

Dock placement seems a bit picky. It seems that it only allows a little part of the dock to extend into the water. How about as long as the dock is touching land it can be placed?

Yeah I've already got a fix for this (hopefully). Basically it was only including 3 tiles on either side of the land/water boundary, but now I'm making it so that all the water and the first 2 tiles of land are counted. This should make the dock placement a bit looser and also allow bigger foundations.

Also, it seems now that buildings can't be placed in water, even if that water is 1 millimeter deep and invisible to the player.

Yeah this is a tricky problem, I noticed some maps like Siwa Oasis have this (near player 1 starting area). There is a difference between what the renderer detects as being "underwater" and what a simple test like GroundHeight < WaterHeight reveals. But due to the terrain sloping, it could be that 1mm actually turns into a lake or river. Maybe it's enough to add some tolerance to the calculation, I'll test and find out.

[historic_bruno]

Also, builders have to reach the dock, so the back of the dock (the part that faces land) can have at most a depth of 2m, but the front must be able to spawn ships, so it must have a depth of at least 1m (see simulation/data/pathfinder.xml for these definitions). Probably rather than hard-coding these values, they should be tied to the unit passability classes.