I have had the idea to implement Regions. Basically that every major city in the game is a region. Each region would map to an administration. In terms of the game, about a 5x5 square of maps around scorn and all maps in the scorn subfolder would be in the scorn region, similarly for navar, brest, darcap, etc. There are only a handful of special cases here (mostly in the quests subfolder), they can be dealt with quite straightforwardly. Oh, and ancient pupland would be its own region, word of recall does teleportation, not time travel.
Right now the major use for this would be to limit word of recall. Word of Recall currently operates to return a character to its save bed. I want to make it so that it returns the character to a save bed /in their current city/. This immediatly has the effect of making the game world bigger, since the spell would work in the city the character is in. Out in the wilderness, I have my eyes on the inn situated halfway between scorn and navar as a reasonable location.
What this would mean is that suddenly the game world is difficult to traverse again, there is no more of this portal off to random city without knowing how you plan to get back. Basing a character in a given city would have meaning, since the travel between cities would become significant (there is no nice way to get to navar from scorn without using the dragon hanger for example).
Portals would still be useful, but so would owning multiple apartments, which few players do atm.
There are a few other minor things that I want to do also, like add the region to the highscore entries, and the mapinfo command.
Other possibilities are a whereiseverybody command, listing regions and number of players there, and a citysay command, which would communicate only with players in the same region.
What I want to know is if this plan is liked, and whether there is anything else I might need to consider. There are some other issues too, which region, if any, should the hall of selection and hall of dm's be in, is it worthwhile to mention transition maps seperatly (it could be used by the map loading code, to optimise unloading)
I've already started implementing it, I figure another 3-4 hours work to complete it, and another 10 to fix the stupidities I introduce
. When I will actually get that time is another matter. Longer term there is the potential for regional currancies, and regional leaders, maybe characters having nationalities, electons, load balancing across multiple servers, etc
I don't pretend that that is likely within the next few months, or even years however.
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