[8] Re: [8] [CF-Devel] Map naming scheme

[Mark Wedel]

     kevin at ank.com
     
      wrote:

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      The advantage as I see it is that the cities remain seperable from the map
     
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      they are on.  They could be placed on any world map, in almost any location
     
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      and still make sense.
     
     
 I suggest you read over some of the mail archives on crossfire.real-time.com. 
While the initial thought of you could place the cities anyplace correct, having
them make sense is more difficult - there are lots of pieces of information
within the city that have location information (eg, the tower is to the south of
here, etc).  To fix all those up gets more complicated.  There were various
ideas posed on how to do it - it basically requires re-writing all the npcs that
have such messages to use scripts, and to also have a global index of the maps
so that the npc logic can really see where these are.  In a short answer, this
is a lot more work - especially if the cities don't move around a lot.

 But I am thinking of changing the way to do cities - I'm now leaning to giving
the city its own 50x50 tile, and updating the links in the adjoining world maps
to use this tile, and putting a note in the 'missing' tile that in fact this
tile is /scorn/city or the like.  This at least makes it a little easier to move
things around, and I think will also make it a bit easier to know how maps are
related to each other (eg, everything in /scorn would go back to /scorn/city,
and not /world/world_110_124 for example).


>
     
      I would probably wouldn't change the scale of the world map at all; It would
     
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      be more interesting to have the world map use automatic transports to
     
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      move you into detailed regions of the map whenever you wander through a
     
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      specific portion of the map.  So rather than applying a city, just have the
     
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      map expand as soon as you get within a few squares of the city... there
     
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      would have to be some sort of indicator to the player of what is happening,
     
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      but then a little two-square forest on the overview map can be expanded by
     
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      some enterprising mapper into the fell den of thieves we all know it should
     
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      have been in a 50x25 submap.
     
     
 Your coming into this conversation a bit late - an informal vote was given, and
pretty much everyone agreed that the world map should be much larger.

 there used for a form of random encounter maps which did what you described -
as walking through, you would get teleported to the encounter map.  That proved
very unpopular and annoying - your trying to get someplace, and have to navigate
your way out of those encounter maps and then work your way around them.

 Note that even with a 1500x1500 world, it typically won't take very long to get
where your going (presuming you know where that is).  I also like it in the
sense that you can actually hide things just by making them hard to find - right
now, the world is so small, the way to hide things is require you be on the
space and then a magic mouth says something.  This is fair enough, especially
given the size of various things (for example, it probably wouldn't take any
player more than a minute or so to search the entire mountain range looking for
a cave in the current map).  With a larger map, searching the entire mountain
range would actually prove to be time consuming.