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

[Matthew Giassa]

If you have multiple types of mice (ie: altruistic, aggressive, 
tribalism-oriented, etc), you could have a pretty entertaining 
simulation play out.

============================================================
Matthew Giassa, MASc, BASc, EIT
Security and Embedded Systems Specialist
linkedin: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/giassa
e-mail:   matthew at giassa.net
website:  www.giassa.net

On 04/01/16 19:20, Robert Brockway wrote:
> 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
>