[crossfire] Platform statement

[Juha Jäykkä]

>   Yes, skills give spells and mana.  One could change it so that the
> highest skill you have determines hit points.  This has an interesting side
> benefit of it would be incentive for folks to focus on certain skills.

I very much like this idea. It would give us the possibility of encouraging 
fighters to stay fighters while not enforcing anything. Perhaps something 
else could be tied to the best skill as well to further encouragement?

>   Clearly, zooming out is useful for finding things.  But what I'm not sure
> is how that interacts in the game.  Is it purely just a mechanism to help
> one find their bearings (I'm in the wilderness someplace, I zoom out, and
> now I can see where Scorn is relative to me).  That helps me travel back to
> Scorn, but if I'm still moving at a slow pace, then I probably go back into
> 'normal' zoom level - once I know I have to travel southeast, being zoomed
> out probably doesn't do me much good.  Now I may zoom out now and again to
> get my bearings, but I don't see myself playing the game in a zoomed out
> mode.

I thought the idea here was something like this: in all zoom levels, moving 
one "square" on the map takes N seconds on *real clock* time; on zoomed out 
mode, you'd therefore "move faster". That would be the advantage and I like 
the idea.

But that brings with it a problem when someone else is playing at the same 
map, but fully zoomed in: would that player see the other dash by at 
unbelievable speed or what? If using transports would be the only way to 
travel at zoomed out modes, that could be explained; the only other solution 
I can think of is that the different zoom-levels are actually different maps. 
That implies that, either you have many different maps covering all the world 
or you cannot zoom in everywhere - just where appropriate maps exist. On the 
other hand, if all "base maps" are at the most zoomed in level, the server 
could generate the zoomed out maps on demand, solving the problem of not 
having maps of every place at different levels (and keeping them in sync) and 
also that of other playes moving at incredible speed.

Coding-wise, I have no idea how difficult that would be to introduce in cf.

-Juha

-- 
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		| Juha Jäykkä, juolja at utu.fi			|
		| home: http://www.utu.fi/~juolja/		|
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