[8] [CF-Devel] Map naming scheme

[Mark Wedel]

     kevin at ank.com
     
      wrote:

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      Have you considered overlays?  Keep the city in a city file and paste it in
     
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      to the world map on the server according to its location, letting the world
     
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      map show through the city map ground tiles if there are any empty ground
     
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      tiles in the city.   Ideally the editor would let you see the world tiles
     
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      that you are covering up as you make your changes to the city files.
     
     
 This could be done.  It adds a new layer of complication to many programs
(server and client) that now need to support this.  In theory, such a major
change of the world should be happening quite infrequent.

 an alternative would be to just make sure the city is 50x50, and make it one of
the tiles, and update the adjacent tiles to connect to it instead of say
world_108_120 or the like (and have the cities tiles connection also updated). 
The problem here is that unless the upper left remains in the same space (eg,
you only add the new spaces to the right and bottom), all the exits would still
shift, requiring work, and you also get a case of a missing tile in the world
map which could be confusing.

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      Scorn the city has to continue to exist as a directory to hold all of the
     
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      buildings, undercity, and the like anyway, but teleports should continue
     
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      to be relative to the city map location.
     
     
 correct.  Its not too hard to update the exits to go to /world/world_108_120
with proper x and y coordinates as needed.

 An alternative method would be to have a mapping file, that would let the
server know the /city/city is actually at world at +418, +1006 or the like.  So
when the server finds an exit that matches /city/city (which is currently the
name for scorn, which itself is bad as there are more than one city), it knows
how to translate those onto the world map.  This is easier to do, but may aslo
result in a problem that many maps don't get properly re-organized.


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      Rivers and mountain chains are interesting because they represent
     
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      natural borders between nations.  Forests are interesting because they
     
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      harbor brigands.  Northlands are interesting because they are the edge
     
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      of the civilization beyond which monsters breed freely.
     
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      You have to create your story first; then make the map that corresponds
     
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      to that story.
     
     
 Have you played around on crossfire with the current continent?  It is so
small, it really has no character at all, and doesn't have space to make much.

 Note that generated continent is no means ideal.  I took it because it had some
features roughly similar to the current continent which means many of the
dungeons can get located in the same general areas (just farther apart), so maps
don't need to get updated.  And that continent was only generated once, so
rivers can get added and other terrain modified as needed.  In a sense, it was
just a great shortcut that IMO did a pretty good job of making something up that
is usuable.  There are certainly patches of terrain which are pretty terrible
(too hodge podge like), and right now because there are no good transition
between terrain types, that makes some things seem uglier even though placing
them together is fine from a realism point of view.

 But if 80% of is it good, that is a really big head start compared to starting
with nothing.