Re: CF: the begining of crossfire

[Hwei Sheng TEOH <hsteoh@cs.toronto.edu>]

On Fri, 3 Sep 1999, Mark Wedel wrote:

> Hwei Sheng TEOH wrote:
> 
> > Just make up a name, I guess. Also, if we *do* come up with a background story
> > for crossfire, what about those "island maps" like Dragon Island, or Dtabb
> > Land (which is an entire continent on its own)? Do we want to merge these
> > continents into one, or keep them separate but have a fixed location relative
> > to each other? Currently, the only things that connect those islands and
> > continents with the "main" continent are the ships that take you to/from
> > there. If we start to have ships where you can control where you sail, we'd
> > probably want to have those islands in fixed locations.
> 
>  My eventual hope is that transportation objects will be added.  So to get to
> dtabb, you would have to get on board a ship and physically sale over there
> (would not be instaneous).

I'd still like the idea of having some (although definitely not all) fixed
ship routes, especially if we keep the multiple continents. Like some fixed
routes for trade ships, etc.. But of course, I agree that it's more fun if
some places can only be reached by "accident" or by information found on some
quest. Also, ships with fixed routes will not be instantaneous -- they would
simply follow a fixed route that reach a particular destination. And, we might
add bad weather, etc., that makes travelling on those ships a little risky.

Also, if we start using time-based objects (I assume that's the direction
we're heading) then we could even have ships that go to a certain place
rather rare, so that the player won't always have the option of going to
certain places whenever he wants.

>  This also has the nice side effect that you could have obscure islands which
> the person who explores might just run accross randomly, but there might also be
> a note in some dungeon about it.
> 
>  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.
> 
>  An even further suggestion was a unified scale - everything the same size.  So
> if you ran accross a house in the countryside, you would not see the image of a
> house you then enter, but instead the walls, door, etc would be part of the
> map.  This would probably increase the scale even more than the 10x mentioned
> above.

IMHO, we need at least two different scales... the reason being that since
this is a 2D game (and I don't think we ever plan to move to 3D any time in
the forseeable future) you lose some aspects of perspective. For example,
walking up to a volcano in a unified scale, you won't even know this was a
volacno until you reach the edge of it. Also, things like the smugglers' ship
in Navar would be hard to do -- the player would only get a verbal message
since the ship itself would be too far away to be visible in the limited 2D
viewing area (on a unified scale).

With two different scales, at least on the larger scale it's possible to put
objects that the player can "see from far", and have the game "zoom in" whan
the player actually approaches it.

> > 
> > Also, we'd have to make up stories for those continents too... or let the
> > map-maker come up with a story. The only concern here is that the stories
> > might become inconsistent.
> 
>  If the scale of the main continent gets increased enough, the need for these
> other continents may get decreased.

Is it possible to make the main continent "expandable"? Like, have some edge
of the map that isn't water, so that people can actually add to it, without
having to modify what is already there?

>  I originally started a little work on incorporating dtabb land simply because
> the main continent started getting a bit too many quests - almost to the point
> that if things kept going on, there would be some quest every 10 spaces.

Actually, if we plan to increase the scale of the world maps, this might not
be a bad thing. The player would have something interesting to do every 50-100
squares. This will make it not seem like a lot of map space is "wasted".

>  As a note, the current maps are based on the 'chico' set of maps.  Don't know
> if that will inspire anything or not.

Sorry, I just recently subscribed to the CF mailing list -- what is `chico'?


T

-
[you can put yourself on the announcement list only or unsubscribe altogether
by sending an email stating your wishes to crossfire-request@ifi.uio.no]