[crossfire] House sizes

[Aaron Baugher]

Mark Wedel <mwedel at sonic.net> writes:

>   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.

I like the idea mentioned earlier of trying to keep them within a
range.  The ranges could even overlap somewhat.  Say a house one block
wide on the outside could be 1-15 tiles wide on the inside, while a
two-block-wide house image could be 10-25 inside, a 3-block house
20-35, and so on.  (Or some other set of ranges that fit better with
the current buildings.)  The bigger the building is on the outside,
the bigger it would *tend* to be on the inside, but map designers
would still have room for creativity.

If for some reason you want a larger map inside your small building,
give it a huge basement. :-)

>   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 don't know if there's a limit on tile size, but there's a 10000-byte
limit on images sent to the server in MAX_IMAGE_SIZE.  If you raise
that, you soon run into MAXSOCKSENDBUF, which is currently 12239
bytes.  (I discovered those when I converted the Demon_Lord into a
single image and it was considerably larger than that before
compression.)  I was able to compress Demon_Lord, which is a 4x8
image, to 7841 bytes, but it only has two colors, so I'm guessing a
more colorful image would be larger.

In any case, I'm sure those limits could be raised, but it's something
to consider.

Also, do many players still play on an 11x11 map view?  Buildings that
are 5x5 or so would make that map feel *very* crowded.  Maybe we could
assume that by 2.0, all the clients would be capable of displaying a
larger area than that?



-- 
Aaron -- http://aaron.baugher.biz/