World Scale (was Re: CF: the begining of crossfire)

[Mark Wedel <mwedel@scruznet.com>]

Raphael Quinet wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 03 Sep 1999, Mark Wedel <mwedel@scruznet.com> wrote:
> [...]
> >  BTW, one of the suggestions to improve game play was to make the
> > scale of the outdoor world larger.  So instead of 80 squares or
> > whatever to get from navar city to scorn, it might be 800.
> 
> Yes, this is something that we should do.  And remove the instant
> teleporters, so that one cannot simply jump from one city to another.
> But this implies that we must first create enough maps in order to
> ensure that each city has enough shops and temples so that the player
> does not need to visit the other cities so often.

 Each of the major cities should probably have temples to all the gods.  Most of
the major ones already have shops.

 I'm not sure by what you mean by the shops.

 IT has been said that one current problem is characters can search all the
shops to find that nice artifact or whatever.

 I have a feeling what you mean is that the shops need to have enough of the
common commodities (ie, food, arrows, perhaps potions and the like).


> Using a unified scale for everything would be too boring: if your
> character is slow, it could take you two minutes to go from one side
> of Scorn to the other.  Athough this might be realistic, this wouldn't
> be fun.  Also, you would loose the overview of the city because you
> would not be able to see more than one or two houses at a time.

 Thats true.  I think 2 scales will also work better.  Even the games like
ultima (or at least some of the older ones) still had 2 scales, even if the town
and shops within the town where the same scale.

 The question is really what those 2 scales are.  For example, if it is
indoor/outdoor, that would then mean that the towns would appear in the
countryside (and not little city icons you get now).  Actually, if the outdoor
scale is increased quite a bit, that may actually work out just fine.

 Cities are maybe 40x40, so if the outdoor scale is increased by 10, that is not
that far out of wack of how big they currently appear on the map (most are the
3x3 city blobs).

Doug wilder wrote:
> 
> Does anybody have any idea what the world really looks like with all the
> places out there? The way we travel in crossfire really doesn't promote
> serious world mapping.

 Not positive what you are talking about, but I have a gif of the main continent
(2500x2500 or so, actually looks better when shrunk to something more sane).  It
is a bit out of date (still has the old graphics), but still gives a fairly nice
overview of the main continent.

 I have a copy on my wall (had access to a plotter that could do 3'x4' sheets of
paper), so I have a nice poster size version.  

 I can upload that gif someplace or another if people want to see it.
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