[crossfire] Conventions for exits in town

[Mark Wedel]

Nicolas Weeger wrote:

>>   For example, stairs no matter where they are, should require an explicit
>> apply to use them
>>
>>   Oak doors could always be auto apply, etc.  Buildings are always explicit
>> apply, and so on.
> 
> I'd say explicit apply for all things you'd expect to use/apply in real life: 
> doors, stairs, ladders, boats, ...
> On the other hands, things like teleporters, shop mats, whirlwind exits aren't 
> expected to need to be applied, IMO.

  And some things may be explicit just based on what they are.  Things like pits 
you don't have much choice of - if there is a pit under you, you are falling.

  A question might be whether are exits, whether auto apply or not, should in 
general be visible.  If you need to apply it, that is clearly the case, but for 
auto apply, it is more a question - on some maps, (front gate to scorn being one 
example) the exits are invisible and applied automatically.  There are also some 
houses same way - you can't see the exits - you just happen to step on the right 
space and are back home.

  I'm sort of the opinion that all exits (unless meant to be hidden, like pit 
traps) should be visible.  The reason for this is that exits are a game 
mechanism - its nice to know what will cause you to move from one place to the 
next.  In real life (I know, always a bad example), when I leave my house and 
walk to the curb, I don't suddenly warp from one map to another as I get to the 
curb - it is a continuous flow.  But in crossfire, you do suddenly get popped 
from one map to another, and that can be somewhat jarring.

> 
> 
>>   So as a player, if I see an oakdoor, I know what it will (or won't do) no
>> matter where I am.
>>
>>   Beyond that, having more consistency based on location sounds good.  It
>> may just mean updating all the maps to have the appropriate exit for their
>> location.
> 
> Yes, some massive update :)

  First step would be to make the archetypes consistent, which may now mean 
there are some duplicate archetypes.  And writing scripts to find exits on maps 
which are changing the move_on would be easy enough.

  The hard part would be examining all of those to see if changing them to 
default (based on that exit) is reasonable - there could be some cases on why it 
was done some way, and changing it another way sort of break things.

  The other time consuming part is the standardization of exits (making all town 
exits oak doors).  But I imagine something like 'sed s/invisible exit/oakdoor/' 
would take care of that pretty easily.