Weather, was Re: [crossfire] Re: Lalo's Bigworld pupland :D

[Mark Wedel]

  I personally don't have much an issue with the poles being on a diagonal vs 
true vertical - a little odd, but whatever.

  That said, as far as weather goes, it may then be nice to be able to specify 
the theoretical location of the poles, even if a map for them doesn't exist.

  For example, it is somewhat obvious that the northwest pole should be at 
world_000_000 - simply because you can't go farther away than that.  But there 
isn't any reason to make the hundreds of maps to fill that gap.

  The southeast pole gets odd/more complicated.  IT depends to some extent if 
the world wraps around (if I sail east enough, does it wrap around west?  What 
about north/south)?  Because if we say the highest map would be world_150_150, 
those questions determine where the southeast pole should be.

  If you can say around the world east/west, than that pole should probably be 
at world_075_150, otherwise the poles on the axis don't work.  If you can say 
around north/south as well as east/west, then you'd want the south pole at 75,75.

  Personally, I'm more inclined to think of the world as an infinite plan.  That 
allows infinite expansion, and gets rid of any odd issues regarding world 
wrapping and compression you should really get.

  But in that model, it then makes sense to have bands of temperature - for 
example, at world_x_130 (far south) would be a band of ice/cold/whatever, but if 
  we had a world_x_180, it might be nice that far down (starts to get warmer).

  In that model, I think it'd be much easier to deal with the bands being either 
horizontal or vertical than diagonal.  Just from a mapmaker perspective, it is 
much easier to see that if the y coordinate of your map is in the 130 range, it 
should be cold - you shouldn't have to plot the odd diagonals (ok, the poles are 
here, which means this line here is cold, etc).

  The other reason for this is that as the world map grows, having bands make 
things a lot easier - the 130 area is always cold, no matter what the x range is 
(0 to 500).  In comparison, as Lalo discovers, if you do poles, then as the 
world grows, those poles will get relocated again, causing yet another climate 
shift.  The only way to prevent that is choose poles right now that are so far 
off they would never be moved - the problem with that is that if we say choose 
0,0 and 500,500, the existing world area only occupies a small area of that 
overall space, and thus the weather it has wouldn't vary much.