[CF-Devel] Iso CF start phase

[Mark Wedel]

Michael Toennies wrote:
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      The change in maps can be shown in a good example:
     
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      the demon lords!
     
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      In Iso, a demon lord will be a little smaller (through the iso looking, he
     
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      will
     
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      look big too). This means, i had for iso maps to rework the maps with demon
     
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      lords
     
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      and change it to "iso demon lord".
     
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      This is the big "umpf". In the first step, flat and iso maps will be not
     
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      compatible
     
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      because booth arche sets are then different.
     
     

 I take it what you mean by this is that monsters will have a 'foot print', but
their height will just be controlled by the images?

 Ie, take the hill giant, currently a 2 space high monster.  In your change, his
footprint will only be once space, but effectively he would be 64 pixels high
(thinking flat here-  I know the iso uses some different scaling there).

 If so, this should also work with overhead, just the results would be uglier
(and client redraw would need to be able to handle taller images).

 This does change the dynamics of maps and monsters however.  Many multi space
monsters right now may take fewer spaces - this effectively means that are more
spell resistant (ie, when hit by a fireball, they have fewer spaces, and thus
won't take as much damage as they did before).  And in the case of the hill
giants above, it means taht if you have a 2 high east/west passage, it now means
that 2 hill giants could attack you, and not just one.

 Is chaning the size/footprint a bad thing?  Not necessarily - I'm just stating
some of the other effects this will have, which will mean many maps and monsters
may need to get rebalanced.


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      Well, perhaps you people don't want this. I will release the iso stuff and
     
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      then we all can
     
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      look.
     
     
 What people want and what can realistically be done are two completely
different things of course.

 I would probably say that most everyone would agree that making the maps
cooler/better is a good thing.  It only takes 1 minute to agree to something. 
It takes a lot more time to actually have it get done.

 That is one reason that it is typically better to try to take things in steps
than re-work everything at once.  With steps, you see incremental progress, and
even if it only gets half done, it means that half of the work that was done was
useful.  Compared to it being an all or nothing.  If it gets half done and never
completed for whatever reason, that work is wasted.

 Is this a good way to write software?  Perhaps not.  But until I see that there
are resources to do a major overhaul at all once, it is probably the easier
thing to do.  Look at the TODO list for a list of things that at one point were
thought to be good things to do.  There is no shortage of of ideas, but there is
a shortage of people to do the work.


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      One is for example, to include 8 way direction moving. This is really not
     
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      the new part.
     
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      Look in the docs, it was a old topic in the game and even the picture logic
     
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      depend on it.
     
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      But its dropped for some reason (btw: you remember why mark? not enough
     
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      pictures or so? I always
     
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      had hate, that you can't see your sw, se,nw and ne direction on map... Don't
     
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      want remember how often
     
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      i die after crushing a spell in the false direction...).
     
     
 Just to be clear - what you are talking about here is 8 direction animation,
not actual moving.  You can of course move all 8 directions currently.

 Probably lack of images or making images distinct enough to see the different
directions.  Putting in support for this should only be a matter of making the
images and updating the archs.  Some creatures (like the fireborn) of course
don't have images that lend themselves good to the different direction.  And
even for many of the humanoids, I'm not positive with N vs NE vs E would look
like (or at least how distinctive it really would be).