[crossfire] A funny thing happened on the way to the new maps

[Robert Brockway]

Hi all.  I'm a long time CF player who has mostly lurked.  I've played on 
and off since 94 or so.  I did some map work ages ago but never submitted 
any.

Anyway recently I've been focussing on doing work on CF.  Since I'm not 
great at C I have been playing mostly with plugins and maps.

Anyway I've been having fun building a new world over the last few months. 
I modified the 'land' utility a little and have played a lot with 
different land forms.  My modified version is called 'bigland' and allows 
for the creation of quite large land forms.  I've written a script which 
calls bigland and records the parameters used in a file so they can be 
reproduced later.

I've created a new world running on my server which is 1000x1000 maps.  I 
started small but gradually made bigger and bigger land forms.  There are 
reasons I went and built a world this big that I can go in to later.

That's really just an intro...

Since finalising the world I wanted I've been adding cities, roads, 
dungeons, etc.  I built one city and then decided it was too close to the 
portal from the old world so I turned it into a ruined city.  I put a few 
monsters in the ruined city - giant rats, some undead and others.  For the 
most part they stay in the city but they may harass travellers on the road 
that passes by the ruined city.

I also put in mice :)  I had wondered whether monsters would move between 
tiles on a world map.  I have my answer now :)  The mice are spreading 
like a plague on my new world map - passing well beyond the original one 
or two maps I placed them on.  They are even activiting new maps which 
surprised me a bit.  They are definitely spreading to maps that none of 
our characters have visited recently.

At this stage they have only been going for about 12 hours but have 
already filled 30-40 maps.

Of course I could restart CF to clear the problem but I've decided to 
leave it for a while to see what happens :)  I suppose eventually number 
of active objects will cause problems but this is only a private server 
with two active players and regular backups so we're all good.

Anyway you will be hearing more of me as I'll be submitting my work.  I 
suspect few players will want a full 1000x1000 map world as it stands 
since it takes up roughly 100GB storage.

I was thinking that a lot of space could be saved if the game tried to 
open a compressed map if it did not find an uncompressed map at the 
location specified when it tried to open a map.  Using xz (or similar) 
compression on maps would be a huge storage saver and would not be very 
cpu expensive.

I'll tell you know how my mouse plague turns out :p

Cheers,

Rob

-- 
Email: robert at timetraveller.org		Linux counter ID #16440
IRC: Solver (OFTC, Freenode and Snoonet)
Web: http://www.pracops.com
I tried to change the world but they had a no-return policy