Re: CF: What do you want?

[David Sundqvist <>]

On 1 Jun 1999, Kjetil Torgrim Homme wrote:
> Also consider making it possible to move less than one square at the
> time, or at least do sliding animations (may be relegated as a client
> issue).

This, unfortunately, would be very difficult, since the concept of
placement is entirely based upon map cell contents rather than
objects and their actual location. But it would be nice. 
 
> >    1) Make a unified or two map scale.
> 
> We need at least two scales.  This is a practical limitation, since if
> we use just one scale, enormous amounts of large houses etc. must be
> drawn.  Today we have roughly three scales: indoors, city, world.
> The world scale is not really needed.

Not necessarily. In the case of a unified scale we should just dump the
houses and other images and concentrate on the 'local scale' images
(which would be annoying since I've already converted a fair amount of
houses to 32x32 during that conversion, but anyway). Houses would be
represented by their outside walls instead. This does cause some problems
with house size, but a lot of current dungeons are very large for the
simple reason of accomodating large numbers of monsters. This would not be
necessary if we are working towards a more adventuring like game. The
number of houses in cities like scorn would probably shrink a lot too,
since the primary objective would be to fill the cities with storyline
related features, and the sprinkle-with-empty-houses temptation would be
far less.

As I detailed in an earlier mail, the world and city maps would become
more like the indoors areas too. You can meet travellers on the highways
and monsters on the side of them, there could be guards and storyline
characters (or even bandits in the seedier areas of town) inside the
actual city rather than just in the houses, the possibility of merchants
in the street, etc. 

Being able to concentrate on just one scale would be easier for
graphics too in the long run. They could be extended with more detail and
variation with some more time. And, the different scales always make some
things look out of place, like weapons on the ground in town, monsters in
town, as well as the actual players. In addition to that, different scales
should be taken into context with speed and ranges, etc. Avoiding that
server complexity would be a good idea, imo.

Yes, all of this would be a lot of work, and it involves maps to a large
extent . But the basic problem of balancing and  direction is extremely
difficult. Currently I think we have sortof a lockup, where we cant
achieve any real balance because the maps are geared towards the way
things are now, so if we modify the server to a large degree to
accommodate a more adventure geared balance, and modify the monster
archetypes to be more similar to players, we have to modify the maps
anyway. And if we have to modify maps to such an extent we might as well
seriously consider the concepts and how the game should evolve.

Wether this should end up in a stable version 1.0 release of current
crossfire (which can continue to have maps and archetypes developed for 
that branch) and a subsequent branch split to the next generation
mapset/graphics/server/game direction or not I cant say. But I cant see a
good way to get from the current gamestyle to a more balanced
adventure/exploration type of game that wont involve serious map changes
of the kind that will essentially require a complete restart and
reintegration-as-modified phase for the maps.

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