[CF-Devel] faster portgate (context diff)

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

On Sat, 15 May 2004, Mark Wedel wrote:

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      Palfy Tamas wrote:
     
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      > Yeah, waiting is as much part of the game as having to spend 15 mins to
     
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      > get to Navar from Scorn on foot. Maybe it's intended, tho I wonder if
     
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      > there was a real reason to make players suffer such things. Just to make
     
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      > things harder so it's much better a challenge? Sure things ain't bad if
     
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      > they are hard sometimes. Messing with players real time thru such pitiful
     
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      > things ain't good either IMO.
     
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        Well, there are certainly shortcuts, eg, get gobs of money, expand your
     
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      apartment, and use the teleporters.
     
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        Note that the bigworld goal wasn't to waste player time.  But it was to
     
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      increase travel time a bit - it never made a lot of sense on the old smallworld
     
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      where walking from town to town was only about 3 times longer than walking
     
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      across the town itself.
     
     
This I admit, tho it wasn't a bad thing for sure. Many-many games (some
examples: Final Fantasy and co., Baldur's Gate II, Temple of EE, lotsa
old good stuff) had the same issue. The idea behind this is, that we now
there are interesting places, and ones that are _not_. But we cannot
put the interesting places next to each other, it would be against our
illusion of reality. So we simply use another scale for by-pass areas, so
the feeling would be still ok, and we don't have to suffer boredom while
traveling from one "interesting area" to another. But I'm sure it's not a
new thing for you either...
I understand that the main idea was to make the world something like in
Wizardy 8, a continous field of gameplay. But without interesting
side-areas and/or random encounters, and with unrecognizable and
unmemorizable pathways it's just missed the point IMO. (Tho I've argued
this before, I made the mistake not suggesting some solutiona. So
here are some: )

- New maps and/with new quests. It would be great, would bring new
challanges, new excitement - most important things in any game. (I fear
without new maps CF is doomed...)

- Rearrange bigworld facade. Like make really memorizable large-sclae
landscape features, and put in some neat recognizable obstacles. Like a
real map and a real land. With real forests and mountains,
swamps, deserts and stuff. In it's current stage it's like a
random-generated messed up compound. Even some messages could help
orientation. (Like "Before you lies the magnificent Great Drake Mountains.
This far-flung highland separates Northwest Coursefall [here could be
the name of the World - Coursefall is just an example {Coursefall - CF
;-) }] from the the Eastern Wastelands..." Or something like that, more
poetic descriptions could increase the game experience really much.)

- Idea of random encounters should be considered. (Random monsters are
_not_ good, for it could lead to many low-lvl players' deaths. Random
encounter could be things like this: Suddenly you teleport into a small
random map area with some random monsters. The maps and monsters could be
specific to the area you are at on the world map. And of course the map
would have an exit teleporter next to you, so you can flee if you want,
and it's good also for players who don't want to deal with too many random
encounters... Tho, I'm not sure it's a very good idea. Simple random
encounters on simple random maps could be simply annoying. Hmm, maybe
some _quests_ could be made which mark you as a player that can recieve
certain random or random-like encouters in certain places. Would be a
difficoult one to code, I admit.

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        But it was a side goal to increase travel times some, so that it was no longer
     
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      especially easy to visit every shop out there in 2 minutes flat.  while it may
     
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      be a bit frustrating at times (I really want a book of XYZ, but this town
     
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      doesn't have it), I think that is a reasonable part of the game.
     
     
Hmm, this sounds reasonable, tho I want to point out, that this is another
feature that makes differences beetween low-lvl and high-lvl players
deeper. (It much more frustrating for a low-lvl player than for a
high-lvl one. And it's not "of course, what do you want man, high-lvl
players have easier life, zat bad"! It's that high-lvl players can
_advance_(relatively)_)faster_ than low-lvl players... The two things are
different!)

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        Now I do plan to make changes sometime soon that changes the player speed
     
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      model some - players will be less likely to be blindingly fast, but player
     
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      minimum speed will also be increased, so that players will no longer move at a
     
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      crawl like that sometimes do when heavily loaded (and heavily loaded for a weak
     
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      character might not be all that much stuff right now).
     
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        Note that a longer term goal is to add other travel mechanisms (horses, boats,
     
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      griffins, etc) that perhaps change travel times.
     
     
Good idea. (Don't forget about dragons, Qz and Fireborns tho... They could
have a new ability at certain lvl, some fast-travel-flying abilty, which
stops working whenever you attack somebody or cast a spell.)

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        I also wouldn't be all to adverse to adding a 'teleporter shop/guild' - has
     
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      teleporters to a few fixed locations (major towns that are normally easy to get
     
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      to) for a price - say like 100 pp or something.  So you then weight money vs time.
     
     
It's a good idea, but I wonder when will it be realized. (In fact there
is one in Stoneville, the Dragon Hangar. But there should be a teleporter
guild _net_, so ma' heart wont stop when I realize, I pushed
the apply button on a bed of reality in Navar...)

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