[crossfire] House sizes

[Mark Wedel]

Yann Chachkoff wrote:
>> What would everyone think of:
>> - deciding that eg one outside square translates to eg 20x20 squares inside. 
>> There may already be such a measurement, but I'm not sure it's that formal
>>
> I see little point on forcing a definite inside:outside scale.

  Maybe it being absolute is a bit too much.  But having a general rule of thumb 
could be a good thing - otherwise things become inconsistent in weird ways.  One 
2x2 house could enter into a 80x80 building, where a 3x3 house enters into a 
40x40 - that type of thing.

  And at some level, these relations can also be odd - some of the house maps 
including the surround garden/landscaping, where as some others put you directly 
into the house.

> 
>> - doing more multisquare (4x3? 6x4?) buildings. This would mean making towns 
>> bigger in the bigworld, but at the same time it would make the whole scale 
>> more coherent i think
> I do agree. The current scale of the buildings is way too tiny to get good 
> representations of them (I mean, a shop is no larger than four men - that's a 
> really tiny shop :)).
> 
> I guess that houses size should look from the outside maps in sync with the 
> size of the players. Houses in the 5x5->15x15 size range do not seem too big 
> or unrealistic to me. However, given that it would require a lot of changes 
> in the maps and archetypes, I guess this should be a 2.0 aim, not a 1.x one.

  At some level, it has to be assumed that the outside scale isn't completely 
uniform - a player isn't as high as the town walls, etc.  Instead, I think we 
need to recognize that there are different scales about.

  Lots of objects in the game don't quite meet correct scale either (that bottle 
of wine is one _big_ bottle), but rather the scale is consistent within the 
object types themselves.

  If we wanted to fix all the scales, we could probably do that, but would 
probably be a major undertaking, as for a starting point, I think you'd need to 
make most players 2x2 or so to keep in scale with the objects they deal with 
(swords, gems, bottles, potions, etc).  Shrinking those items to be correct 
scale I think would make them too small to be distinguishable on the map.  But 
that also starts to get into another discussion - one which we could have, but 
something I think we'd probably be looking at more for the 3.0 timeframe.

  So back to houses/buildings - I think it becomes more important that they 
become consistent with each other (a 3x3 building is bigger inside than 2x2, 
which is bigger than a 1x2, etc).  While a 1x1 building is odd in size relative 
to the players, it is no more odd than the other scale issues with other objects.

  Also, there is some limit on how big multipart images can be - I'd have to 
look at the map protocol, but I think right now it is somewhere in the 6-8 space 
range.  This could be fixed in various ways.


> 
> I also guess the weird footprint of some monsters/buildings would benefit to 
> be corrected at the same time (for example, hill giants occupying 1x2 spaces, 
> when in fact they are "tall", not "long").

  Yes - that should be fixed.  There really shouldn't be any monsters with a 
rectangular footprint, as it doesn't make sense - at least for height.

  For some it does perhaps make sense, like wyverns and the red dragons.  This 
is because they are rectangular creates.  In theory, they should be able to 
rotate, so that they are either 1x2 or 2x1 - I think that is doable, but 
requires some amount of coding and archetype work.  In comparison, fixing 'tall' 
monsters is just archetype changes.  Those changes should only happen in the 2.0 
trunk, not the 1.x, but as far as I see, could happen anytime (in fact, at some 
level, the sooner the better as it then lets us find problems earlier).

  I suppose that is true for everything 'the sooner the better', but there is 
the issue of finding time to do so.  OTOH, this is one of those things that 
doesn't require programming experience to fix.