[CF-Devel] 25 by 25 instead of 11 by 11 map

[Mark Wedel]

On Fri, 25 May 2001 
     
     pc-crossfire at crowcastle.net
     
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      This may not be the right way of doing it.
     
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      If, instead, whenever the player moves, you sent a direction code to the
     
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      client with a special value for teleport, you would solve the problem with
     
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      only needing 4 bits, and you wouldn't have to worry about a maximum map
     
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      size or weird behaviour with tiling maps.
     
     
 True.  What I'm worried about in the teleport cases is what happens when
the teleport is within the same map, and maybe in the same vicinity?  You
may not to lose that extra caching.

 Of course, this may not be an issue at all of extra caching of edge tiles
is not done.

 I'm not too concerned about saving a byte in updating the players coordinates
when they  move - the actual bytes needed for updating the map and other
information will be so much more, that trying to optimize that to save 10%
will be a much bigger gain than trying to save a byte here.

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      My main reason for arguing this is to support transparent map tiling.  With
     
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      server-supported tiling, you will be changing maps, but the client doesn't
     
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      need to know this.  Hence, if we can just tell the client we moved one
     
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      square, then it works just like moving within one map.
     
     
 Reasonable concern.  To me, here are the potential cases to worry about:

1) Normal movement - the trivial case - easy to do.
2) Player changes maps - old cache is toast - clear it out.
3) Player transitions across tiled maps - old cache is still usable.
4) Player moves many spaces within the same map (ie, dimension door,
   teleportor).  Depending on amount of movement, keeping the old information
   could still be desirable (think of cases where there may be a gate
   along a wall and you just want to get to the other side so you ddoor
   two spaces - much of your old cache is still usuable).

 Simple method is to do as you suggest (just say player moved east for
example).   That covers cases 1 and 3.  If player uses exit/telporter (2,4),
just throw everything out.  Not ideal, but keeps things simple (one
other disadvantage I realized with the sending coordinates is the
teleporter issue - it may allow players a much easier time to figure their
way back/home.)

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      Personally, I think the automatic map tiling is really critical right now.
     
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      It really needs to be done before expanding the main world map.
     
     
 There are lots of really important things to do.  I would say a new
editor may be pretty important also - doing a major map rehaul may
require better tools than we have now (or at least enhancements to
what we have now, like say a expander built into the editor so you can
say 'expand this map 5x' to make the resize easier).