[crossfire] Transports

[Mark Wedel]

  Quick notes on issues/questions raised:

1) I had thought about transports having maps associated with them (map of a 
ship, etc).  But that adds a lot of complication - first, you need to somehow 
make those maps unique, update exits, etc.  But also, you get issues of actual 
appearance.  IMO, when driving around/whatever, you just want a relative small 
thing moving about.  So you would have the case that you enter/board the ship, 
it takes you to a new map, but then to sail it, you then have to transition back 
to it just being the ship icon, not the entire map.  To me, this just adds a lot 
of complication without adding a whole bunch.

2) the move_block can be given to certain objects to prevent them from being 
taken into dungeons, etc.  This means more move types would be needed - 
move_horse, move_cart, etc.  Easy enough to do, just need to think about what 
movement types are needed (you don't really want one for each transportation 
object - you want some level of abstraction).  But this could be useful - carts 
could perhaps not go through jungles, forests, mountains and other rough terrain.

3) Shops are not much an issue - the block in point 2 can be used.  But there is 
code right now that aggressively looks for unpaid inventory in containers - that 
code should work just fine for transports.  And arguably, in some cases, being 
able to bring in transports to shops makes things easier - don't have to leave 
the shop, get more items, enter again, etc.

4) Scale is always an issue.  Arguably, players are too big for most stuff in 
the bigworld map (or all buildings must use magic to be bigger on the inside 
than they appear).   For that matter, right now, things like the longships and 
the like would appear out of scale - a longship could apparantly only hold 2 
people based on size, which obviously isn't correct.  But I'd say it is 
something that is hard to really get right given we still have varying scales in 
the game.

5) The idea of 'picking up' and transport to use it is odd to me.  Picking up a 
wagon doesn't make sense.

  What may make sense is that you apply the transport to board it and leave it 
(that makes sense - that is the same logic like entering exits, etc).

  If you are aboard the transport, you can see everything loaded onto it.  If 
you drop something, it goes in the tranport, and not the space.  This would 
probably be most intuitive interface wise.

  Also, thinking about this, probably necessary to have some flag to denote if 
items can in fact be loaded into the transport.  You can't necessarily pile 
stuff onto a horse, but could on a wagon.

6) Damage - damaging transport requires a whole new set of code and 
complication.  Do transports now have resistances and the like?  Do they heal, 
etc?  I'd say this could perhaps be done later, but not sure how compelling it 
is to do it - may just really create more bother and complications.