[crossfire] House sizes

[Yann Chachkoff]

> Maybe it being absolute is a bit too much.  But having a general rule of thumb could be a good thing 

Yes, I agree with that.

> 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.

What annoys me with such scaling - for buildings, I'm not speaking of objects the size of a bottle or a sword - is that it prevents abstracting the visual representation of the game from its logical one. So, although generating a 3D view (or a 2D isometric one, or any other view than the top-down 2D view) from the data grid sent by the server would technically be not too hard, those scaling issues make the result rather ridiculous :). I'm also worried by the risk of wasted work: who can tell we wouldn't need to change scales again in the future ? 

> If we wanted to fix all the scales, we could probably do that, but would probably be a major undertaking,
>(...)
>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.

I tend to think that it is better to handle the whole scaling issue at once, instead of taking the transitional route - rescaling buildings alone would already mean a lot of work, both graphically and 'mapically'. Fixing all the scales later would probably mean fixing buildings again, and thus difficult work on the GFX would have been wasted (it isn't as if we had a lot of graphists... :)).

> 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.

Yeah - maybe that's the biggest problem - it is easier to code a monster than to draw it :).

I guess that we could proceed by not changing any of the current maps, but building a parallel set of renewed ones (maybe linked to the old ones in a way or another, so that they can be tested by players ?). So that could be a change not arbitrarily fixed for a given release, but something that could replace the old maps "once it is ready".