[CF-Devel] Results of New World Map design questionare.

[Mark Wedel]

People who voted:
Yann Chackoff, Tim Rightnour, Andreas Vogl, Rick Tanner, Joris Bontje, David
Hurst, David Delbecq, Mark Wedel

Results:

1) How to redo world map:
2 - All by hand (a)
4 - Computer aided (b)
1 - All computer, unique per server (c)
1 - None of the above (use world some people are working on)

 Computer aided is preferred by a small margin.  But this gets related somewhat
to #2 below - the smaller the map, the more feasible A is.  Also, I think even
with going with B, things will continually get touched up, so at some point it
may result in almost a completely hand done map.

 I'd be curious to know more about this other world map people are working
on.

 As an aside, it would be really nice if developers used the mailing list
to keep others apprised of what they are working on.  I don't mean just the
map - there are lots of things that I see are done/committed with never really
hearing much about it until it is done.  This reason for this is many fold. 
This lets others know what is being done so they don't duplicate it, and
also presents a place where suggestions and flaws can be mentioned (better
to find out a scheme won't work before you write 1000 lines of code and find
it can't be used because of some fundamental flaw).  If its a big project,
perhaps send out a status once every week or two.

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2) How large it should be

1 - 300x300
1 - 512x512
3 - around 1000x1000 or larger (these three responses did not specifically state
    that, but there were three responses with the map around 1000x1000 or a bit
    larger than that, so I codensed them here)
1 - 1000x1000 -> 3000x3000
2 - 2500x2500

 Other than it being at least 1000x1000, not a lot can be drawn from this.
My personal thought is bigger is better - simply so it doesn't have to get
redone at a future point when people say it is small.  My thought is also 
that the city icons would get removed and the buildings themselves get placed
at actual scale, and doing tha with 1000x1000 means the cities will end up
taking more space than they currently in some cases (a 3x3 city icon
would be 30x30 spaces).

 If you want to do the math, there is roughlu 8 ticks/second.  If the world
map is 1000 spaces wide, and you can move with speed 1 through the entire
thing (say on a road), it would take about 2 minutes to cross.  You can
easily figure out how a larger/smaller map affects this, as well as speed
(eg, if speed is .2 due to terrain and equipment, it would be 5 times longer,
or about 10 minutes).

 This is of course both a plus and minus - taking 5 minutes to get to the
entrance of a dungeon could be annoying.  OTOH, this could make some of those
teleport spells more useful.  Perhaps also something analogous to shortcuts
could be done?  Have something like a shortcut teleporter in the town/apartment,
and if you step on it, you get teleported to wherever some object in
your inventory says so.  Thus, at the start of dungeons, you could have
these objects that then create a shortcut (different discussions on whether
this should be invisible, can only have one, or details on how this is
done).  But this could mean for example that once you get to it once, its
no big deal.  It could also make shop hunting more difficult, but IMO some
things could be done to reduce the need to hunt all the shops looking for
things (like have a unlimited stock of potions of life/fire resistance/cold
resistance in the magic shops).

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3) How dynamic it should be:

3 - Highly dynamic, forest grow/die, grassland may turn to desert, etc (a)
5 - Slightly dynamic, base terrain remains same, but special plants and
   trails may show up. (b)
0 - not dynamic (c)

Since presumably doing 'b' will have to be done before 'a' can be done, this
provides guidance.  Also, a run time option can be done to control
how dynamic it ends up being.

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4) Cohesiveness of new maps
0 - everything on main continent (a)
5 - somewhat cohesive, try to keep on main continent (b)
2 - put wherever needed (c)

 Somewhat to be expected.  This probably means that some of the
smaller areas (port joseph for example) should probably get merged in,
but bigger ones, like pup land should probably remain seperate, or at least
an island.  The problem with many of the small areas (like lake county) is
that they are a small area with constraint of movement, eg, you see just
plains or forest to the north, yet you reach a black edge and can't move
further).

 I'm also not sure what to do with dtabb land.  That sort of got started
for a new continent since the current one was starting to get filled up.
If dtabb land is still desired, a full continent should probably be
made for it - perhaps but some of the real high level stuff, like brest 
there, simply so it takes some work to get there (for that matter, you
could use npc logic so that ships won't take someone to that continent
unless they are some level)

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5) More than one continent (Looking back on this, I worded it badly, and 
two of the answers were basically the same, so no wonder that b is the heads
up winnder)

6 - If a good reason is given (b)
1 - Many if computer generated world map (NA)
1 - Not a big deal to have more than one (NA)

 This wasn't a very important question either.  it was mostly so I could
see peoples opinions.  So down the road, this perhaps gets expanded
with a new continent the same size of the first.