[CF-Devel] Suggestion.

[Andreas Vogl]

Tim R. wrote:

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      I'll make two points.. rather than trying to convince you here.
     
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      1) quests.  They will still work just fine.  As Mark had mentioned in
     
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      his email, there will be a coordinates file that is generated as the
     
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      cities and locations are placed randomly on the map.
     
     
This is a poor workaround for the problem. If I want to make a plot,
I need a map. And I need to know what the map looks like.
Do you think Tolkien could have written his books with a coordinates/
constraints file about Middle-Earth?

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      2) Random vs Hand Generated.  This does not preclude shipping a hand
     
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      generated world map.  But I think alot of the reason random maps suck,
     
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      is the generation routines are very simple. [...]
     
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      By using a perlin, or similar function to generate a topography map, [...]
     
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      the world will actually be very similar to a natural world, and indeed
     
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      evolve. [...] I agree that random maps built from geometry don't really
     
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      work out, and cannot compete with hand-drawn maps. But the maps in games
     
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      like civilization have allways impressed me as being very realistic.
     
     
This is not civilization. CF players don't build cities on the map and
make warfare to neighboring nations by harvesting their squares.
CF is an RPG fantasy game - and as such, terrain by itself is completely
unimportant.
Evolving forests and such seems a bit of an overkill for a simple RPG
like CF. If forest has no meaning - what exactly is the purpose of
evolving forest?
Do you really think this would add a lot of gameplay value?

Besides, are you planning to replace Lake Country and Pupland outdoor
maps by random generated stuff? I bet not.
And why not? - Because it is obvious that a random map could never
suite these places.

IMO, the mere suggestion to replace the main-continent worlmaps by
random ones indicates how much we need to redo them - By hand.


Andreas V.