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

[Lalo Martins]

And so says Mark Wedel on 07/01/06 13:50...
>  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).

/me puts his fantasy writer hat

Ok, here is one neat proposal.  Oddly enough, nothing I have ever seen
in-game mentions a sun.

So, the world is an infinite plan.  0,0 is an arbitrary point, probably
the further NW that the sailors of the Old Empire ever sailed.

Light/heat sources are a number of fixed points in the sky (or on the
top of high mountains even!).  For reasons that the mages and priests
spend their lives debating, their light goes off once a day (for the
night), and it follows a cycle of strenghtening and weakening over a
longer period that became known as an year.

(The days have the same length on all known light sources.  The seasons
could be different if we wanted, but that's probably unnecessary
complication on the weather code.)

So each continent has one or more "suns" independent of the others.  The
reason we don't sail much between continents is that it's too cold, the
water freezes, and even magic won't work.  Only extremely skilled
sailors with the help of extremely skilled mages can find the routes -
like the navy of the Old Empire.

(Oddly enough, spells of "teleportation" style work across these
distances, so word of recall, town portal, etc isn't affected - this
probably explains how the dragon hangars and Pupland transport work.)

/me takes off the writer hat

Codewise: any tile not mapped will be defaulted by the weather system to
a large sheet of ice, which blocks spells, damned.

Gamewise, we pick an arbitrary point of the existing continent.
Personally, I kind of like the idea of putting the "sun" on the top of a
high mountain, so somewhere to the northwest of the big range in the
middle of the continent would be best - most places keep more or less
the same climate, and even the Antarctic doesn't require moving.

As for "my" continent, I'll take a good look at it and decide where to
put the light source(s).

best,
                                               Lalo Martins
--
      So many of our dreams at first seem impossible,
       then they seem improbable, and then, when we
       summon the will, they soon become inevitable.
--
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