[CF-Devel] speculations about the floor (elevation)

[crossfire-devel-admin at archives.real-time.com]

  Elevation is relative.  I'm not sure what they use on Mars as a baseline for 
example.  But I'd also tend to venture that places without atmosphere would have 
more extreme ranges (no erosion to wear down high peaks/fill in low valleys with 
sendiment).

  LOS & elevation: While it may not make a huge difference, it might be 
noticable.  Eg, you get to the top of the mountain and see 12 spaces instead of 
2.  However, changing this should probably go with a complete LOS revamp 
(partial blocking, eg, each forest square blocks 1/3'rd your view for your 
example, so you can see up to 3 forest spaces away, but not farther than that).

  As far as elevation:

  I'm not concerned about elevation for worldmaps other people come up with.  It 
is their responsibility to come up with elevation values for that.  To follow 
your example - if you scan in a map of france, presumably you want your 
elevations to match the real elevation of france.  Having calculated values 
certainly do it - it is up to the map maker to figure out how they fill in that 
elevation data.

  Perhaps the biggest issue I have with a per map base elevation is that it 
really doesn't seem like a good solution - suppose you have a north/south 
running mountain range.  Now suppose you have two tile maps, connected on that 
vertical seem.  The right map is complete mountain range, so should have a good 
base height.  That left map has 5 spaces of mountains along it right edge, going 
down to hills/forest/plain/ocean (near coastal range).  This obviously has a 
much lower base map height.

  if I understand your (Todd) plan correctly, the idea here would be that the 
server/elevation generator runs, sees those discrepencies, and files in the 
data, so the mountains on the left map aren't 5000' below those on the right 
because of the base elevation change?

  I suppose that works. It would, however, seem to create a relatively smooth 
elevation table (no rolling hills for example).  It would also seem difficult in 
such a situation for the the road that goes through the mountains to be lower 
(eg, it is going through the pass, and not over the top of the mountains).

  I unfortunately don't have a great solution to this.  I can see the difficulty 
of keeping the elevation current in the existing world maps.  OTOH, doing so 
would also seem to be one of the easiest solutions - mapmaker then has complete 
control over elevation of any particular space.

  Some of this elevation stuff has problems just in the fact of the terrains 
being played with.  One can certainly have forest mountains, forested hills, 
etc.  I think I sort of had the vision of 1 space = 1 mile (obviously, isn't 
accurate for towns, but if you figure that the 'island' is 1000 or so spaces in 
diameter, not really far off the mark - I suppose you could increase/decrease 
that based on your perceived idea of how big th continent is.

  I mention this in the sense of what type of granularity one may look at.  One 
oculd reasonably expect there to be many more lakes about (a 1 mile diameter 
lake probably isn't that uncommon).



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