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

[Mark Wedel <mwedel@scruznet.com>]

 First, in terms of improved graphics and size, David Sundqvist had expressed to
me that he had already started work going to 32x32 image, as well as improving
some of the color depth.

 One issue on colro depth - if you go to more than 8 bit color, then you need to
deal with the client being able to load/reduce the colors of images at it loads
them.  This is a little harder as it seems, as the client only loads images as
they are referanced, so you just can't do color matching to previous tiles
(otherwise, what happens if the first set of tiles is a wilderness seen, that is
largely greens and browns?  When you then load that city, matching against
greens and browns may not do much good.  So you either need to do some pre color
allocation, or allocate the existing images.

 I believe David was working with around a 200 color set - enough to give good
shading for most stuff (after all, on a 32x32 image, how many different colors
do you really need?) but also less than 256, so all can be displayed on an 8 bit
display (although a private color map may be needed).

 Two problems if images get much larger than that:

1) You need to have an alternate image or rescale the big image so that you have
a reasonable sized image to use in the inventory and look lists.  If you go to a
64x64 image size (for example), they won't work very well there.

2) Larger images mean more download time, which could be annoying as players run
into new images.  Caching should minimize that a bit however.


David Andrew Michael Noelle wrote:

>     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.

 But currently, crossfire makes no attempt to adjust movement speed on scale.  I
don't see any reason to change that if we do adjust scales.  Remember, one of
the criticisms of a unified scale is that it could take a very long time just to
wander across town, which would be boring for the player.  If you adjust speed
based on scale, you run into the same problem.

 The other problem with that is you then need to adjust everything by scale
(spell ranges, monster speeds, arrow distance/speed, etc).  And this starts to
get really complicated, since some objects may not be clear on whether they
should be hit by this time adjustment.  Also, while movement should perhaps be
slower (due to longer distance), hp/sp regen should be just as high (since you
are spending the same amount of time)

 So I think it is safe to say that speed will remain constant accross the
different scales.  Not realistic, but for playability, it works OK.  If this was
a single player game, you would just have more time elapse as the player moves
each space.  But that doesn't work well in multiplayer.


>     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.

 Suggestions in the crossfire timescale has suggested 1 crossfire day = approx 2
hours real time (whenever that gets added.)

 I personally think it would be very boring to spend 2 hours to walk accross the
continent.  Something like 5 or 10 minutes would be OK.

 Since we are not precisely worried about time scale, I am not going to worry
all that much about the overall scale.

 Maybe the town is larger/smaller on a 2 scale system than it really should be. 
OTOH, it removes some inconsitencies - there are towers, castles, forts, and so
on littered on the current world map.  If the town maps show up as part of those
world maps, those objects start to make more sense in terms of scale.  Of
course, those objects should only appear on those outdoor maps.

 But as said, if the outdoor scale is increased by 20 or 30, the current town
maps would fit just fine in the world scale.  I personally think realisms and
connectivity by having city maps as part of the world map will offset any
possible unrealisms in the difference of scale.
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