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

[Mark Wedel]

Lalo Martins wrote:
> 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).

  the other more 'traditional' belief is that it is the sun god who flies his 
chariot across the land which is the sun.  That is of course why the sun moves 
accross the sky - at some point, he is just so far away, you can't see him anymore.

  That was more what I was thinking.  And this works fine - no reason you can't 
have multiple sun gods (or maybe that one god has some helpers that travel the 
different lines).  Multiple gods is interesting - one oculd imagine different 
gods one could worship in different areas - potential reason to start in other 
areas also.

  The oddity about doing single points of sun is that distance from that sun 
should determine the weather  as well as light.  Thus, if we put it in the 
middle of the existing continent, in practice, the center should be nice and 
warm and sunny, and the coastal areas (given the continent is somewhat round) 
should all be cold.  I don't think that really works with the existing system.

  This can be solved by having multiple suns sprinkled around the continent, but 
this starts to get more complicated - especially as related to the weather, 
because the weather code has to know where these are.  And you'd basically get 
the issues you have with lighting - dark (cold) areas wher the suns don't reach, 
and hot areas where they overlap, etc.  It'd seem to be a fairly odd setup to me.

  The odd part about my plan is why you get seasons - I suppose one could state 
that for some reason, certain times of year the gods flaming chariot isn't as 
bright, this colder (and shorter days because it would disappear from sight sooner).