Maybe we all are coming to it from wrong direction?
My proposition: do away completely with barrels as special floor tile. Implement them as "Monsters" with very specific AI and attributes.
This AI and attributes will ensure they will not move, will not count in kills, are pushable, explode when die, etc etc - and hopefully not everything in same attribute isBarrel or something equally shoddy. I would want to allow, for example, exploding monsters on kill.
It would allow for:
- Elimination of most often reported bug in history of DoomRL. Sorry, this cannot be left as is.
- Having many various background tiles (currently default + bridge, water/acid/lava tiles are special case) in future versions of DoomRL. Without this fix, it will get only worse in future.
- Allows pushing barrels over water, flooding level with water does not leave islands with barrels on them, allowing barrels to survive a while on acid (push run away, watch monsters go boom) etc.
- Easy "exploding monsters" for modders.
Surely it is less work than some unneeded level layer just for barrels?