Firepole vertical control

[Moggles]

Hi. I just saw some footage of someone struggling with vertical control of dupes on a fire pole.

I wondered if anyone else is avoiding them because dupes keep using them to climb so here's how I handled it.

The horizontal door at the top of the pole is the key. Set it so that dupes can only go down through the door. After this you can further control directional flow of the dupes using right to left access rights on each floor. In a setup like this dupes will always move clockwise to their next destination.

[Exa]

They should just disable the way up I think, I bet they will

[Moggles]

13 minutes ago, Exa said:

They should just disable the way up I think, I bet they will

I think the path finding should probably prioritize ladders for upwards movement. If you disable climbing on the pole completely you might get them trapped. If you forget to make a ladder to get out at least they still have a potential to get back up the slow route.

[Kiako]

This works well on short path, but when you have more than (I don't even know but it's a lot) tiles, Dupes don't seem to check if it's possible to go trough doors. They climb the pole then fall a little until they die of starvation. So yes, vertical control would be nice.

[Moggles]

5 hours ago, Kiako said:

This works well on short path, but when you have more than (I don't even know but it's a lot) tiles, Dupes don't seem to check if it's possible to go trough doors. They climb the pole then fall a little until they die of starvation. So yes, vertical control would be nice.

I've not seen this but my fire poles have been 8 tiles high at most. The only other idea I can think of is to add more pneumatic door separators.

But this may all be addressed in an update this week I'm sure.

[Coolthulhu]

17 hours ago, Exa said:

They should just disable the way up I think, I bet they will

This is less than a half of the solution to the problem. They would still slide down ladders instead of poles.

Actual solution is to make pathfinding actually understand travel time. This shouldn't be hard (unless the code is a mess, which I don't think it is), shouldn't be much work and would make freeform bases much less of a bad idea.

[Risu]

Yeah wouldn't be terribly difficult to add pathfinding penalty to both ladders and fire poles.
Can't give going down the fire pole a negative penalty so gotta give it a lower cost than the ladders.
 

[Coolthulhu]

49 minutes ago, Risu said:

Can't give going down the fire pole a negative penalty so gotta give it a lower cost than the ladders.

Would be best if it was actually based on actual spent time and not arbitrary, though even arbitrary penalties would be better than this terrible pure distance once.

Huge bonus points if the pathfinding actually understood that jumping to/from ladders/poles takes much more time than walking comparable distance.