[CF-Devel] Future crossfire changes/projects

[Mike Ponicki]

I think the two biggest areas of needed development right now are:

1) performance issues, and
2) making the world a LOT bigger

When I think of many massively multiplayer RPG's (ultima online,
everquest etc.) they have these HUGE areas you can travel through. Take
everquest for example. It would take you probably five or more hours of
straight walking just to get from one side of a continent to another (and
eq has multiple continents too). As well, it'd be impossible for a weaker
character to travel by him/herself, because of the monsters that would be
encountered on the way

As it is right now in crossfire, it takes about one minute to travel the
main continent from border to border, and there are no risks involved, as
there are no monsters on the world map.

The only real purpose to improving performance in crossfire is so that
we'll be able to have more than 4-5 people on a server at once without
getting serious lag. In everquest, there are between 1500 and 2000 people
on a server at once. I think our goal at first should be to get 100 people
on a single crossfire server with lag that doesn't make the game
unplayable

However, improving the performance is absolutely pointless without
improving the size of the world. The dungeons in crossfire are not that
large, the world is small, and the number of "popular" (good dungeons to
level up in) are very few. So, let's say we improve performance and a
server can handle 100 people without crippling lag. That doesn't mean
anything if the world can't handle that many people without taking all the
fun away from the game

So, my vote is to make the entire game on a 1:1 scale, including shops,
dungeons, towns, and the world map. This task should be worked on in
parallel with performance improvements to the client/server
architecture to allow more players on a server.

This way it would be much more like everquest, where the world is vast and
can't be traveled in mere seconds. Then, all of the performance gains in
the client/server architecture won't be without purpose.

-Sniper
     
     sniper at citilink.com