[10:31:25] <geoo> Re: digging a tunnel. Imagine you're digging a hole, then you move the spade away from you instead of shoving everything onto your feet. Now imagine a diagonal tunnel. I'd argue the same thing, now converge the angle to horizontal. At which point do you change from down-up to up-down? You don't. Digging down-up naturally comes from an anthropomorphic being's physique. Few people have courage to shovel over and behind them (because of danger of everything landing in
[10:31:52] <geoo> your face), but rather shovel slightly to the side to avoid that predicament
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http://www.nordicbots.com/?id=73&net=quakenet&cid=81576&year=2015&month=7&day=13)
To be honest I can't say I've ever seen how bashing a horizontal tunnel would actually work in real life. Maybe someone need to give me a youtube video link.
Also I was thinking primarily of the Lemmings basher which depict only the use of hands, rather than with a tool like in Lix. So I guess my burrowing-animal analogy was already off to a bad start.
A scooping motion would be a natural motion to use to scoop up dirt on the surface with a shovel or spade. However, when we are at the wall and there is no longer a surface to lift the scooped dirt up and out of, something more must be going on?
So perhaps neither motion is any more or less realistic than how things would actually work in real life. That said, I still wonder if it would be cleaner to not carry out any partial removals and just removal all at once at the end of the stroke, regardless of which direction you want the stroke to go. If nothing else, it'd avoid introducing any new behaviors that might lead to new backroutes in existing levels for either singleplayer or (probably less likely) multiplayer.