Re: CF: RE: Size scale vs. time scale and new graphics

[David Andrew Michael Noelle <>]

dragonm wrote:
> 
> You've never driven an ox cart, have you.  :)  I have, in New England.  Oxen
> walk slower than people.  :)

    You're right.  I've never been that close to an ox, and I don't feel any
particular need to remedy that.  I'll just take your word for it.


> In any case, I'm kind of confused here.  You and Mark seem to have two
> different concepts of "scale."  Your definition seems to involve zooming out
> on the same map, whereas Mark's definition seems to involve switching to a
> different map with a different ratio of tiles per square meter in order to
> represent indoor scenes at reasonable granularity without severely impacting
> outdoors by vastly increasing the data load to maintain the same scale.
> Basically retaining the existing setup for shops and other buildings, so far
> as I can tell.

    No, I meant the same thing Mark did.  I think the part that confused you
was references to covering the same space on two different maps.  That was
something you could do in Wasteland that I can't think of any examples of in
Crossfire.  Basically, if a 32x32 town map appears as a 3x3 square on the
world map (as Scorn does now), it should take as long to travel 32 spaces in
town as to travel 4 spaces outside.
    I was suggesting that the player's speed should be in meters per tick
and not squares per tick, so the apparent speed in squares per tick would be
much higher on small maps than on the world map.  I was also suggesting that
players should be able to move much faster on the world map with
transportation devices (horse, boat, magic carpet, broomstick...) but those
same devices wouldn't speed up small-scale movement at all.

    Personally, I think I'd prefer three map scales, world, town/outdoor,
and dungeon/indoor.  If each square indoors is one square meter and each
square outdoors is one square kilometer, there should probably be something
in between.  Right now, I'd guess the world map scale to be around
10km/square, just to pick a round number.  Magnify it by a factor of 10, and
you'll still have one square on that map representing 1000 x 1000 squares of
the smaller scale.
    One possibility that would be similar to what we have now would be an
indoor scale of 1m/tile, a city scale of 32m/tile, and an outdoor scale of
1024m/tile, which gives the same 32:1 ratio between indoor and city as
between city and outdoor.  It should definitely take more than a single day
of travel to walk across a continent, even if you're not wearing a full suit
of plate mail.  So, here's the part where we balance playability against
realism.  Personally, I lean toward realism, and try to appease playability
by increasing realism in interesting, new ways.

-- 
            -Dave Noelle,                 
            -the Villa Straylight,  http://www.straylight.org
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