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Regions

Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 9:51 am
by cavesomething
This is a bit unusual as far as threads in this forum go, but bear with me.

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.

Re: Regions

Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 10:09 am
by Casper
cavesomething wrote:What I want to know is if this plan is liked, and whether there is anything else I might need to consider.
I like it.
cavesomething wrote:There are some other issues too, which region, if any, should the hall of selection and hall of dm's be in
Make it so a map belongs to a region by choice. HallOfDMs seems to be in a dimension of its own, so putting it into any regoin seems unwise. Same with transition maps, there isn't one place they can be put.

Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 10:19 am
by cavesomething
Well my plan such as it is, is that any map not assigned a region gets the generic region 'wilderness'. Maybe hall of dm's should be in 'a higher dimension' or 'another world' (the amiga gamer in me prefers the second one of these)

The issue is with wrap arounds, if PK messages are implemented (as there have been calls for, AFAIK not in yet) then they should probably say foo killed bar in [region name]. If they are on two linked maps on different regions, then which one should it count them in? (one possibility is (foo killed bar on the border of baz and baz2)

Incidentally, this leads also to the possibility of crime stats, methinks the idea is intriguing....

Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 1:22 pm
by Ryo
I like your idea of regions. Would make the game more fun :)
cavesomething wrote:The issue is with wrap arounds, if PK messages are implemented (as there have been calls for, AFAIK not in yet) then they should probably say foo killed bar in [region name].
PK messages are displayed, now: when a player kills another one, the kill message includes 'PK''.

Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 1:41 pm
by cavesomething
Ryo wrote: PK messages are displayed, now: when a player kills another one, the kill message includes 'PK''.
Ah, wasn't aware of this, cat2 hasn't updated yet, and metalforge obviously doesn't have enough PK-ing going on :)

Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 8:33 pm
by Leaf
cavesomething wrote:
Ryo wrote: PK messages are displayed, now: when a player kills another one, the kill message includes 'PK''.
Ah, wasn't aware of this, cat2 hasn't updated yet, and metalforge obviously doesn't have enough PK-ing going on :)
It also works for accidental player "suicides" and arena duals..

Foo killed Foo with fireball (pk).

Foo killed Bar in hand to hand combat (duel) (pk).

Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 9:55 pm
by Zephyrus
I don't particularly support WoR limits. With a map one is familiar with, it may not be too bad, but there are some times when being able to go back to your Scorn savebed makes everything so much easier. Limiting the spell may limit exploration for some, because not all of us can make the walk from Navar to Scorn (for exapmple) without becoming really frustrated. With the current worldmap size, I do not particularly enjoy the idea of not being able to recall.

Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 10:18 pm
by Mith
as far as i understand, the idea is not to disable WoR, but to limit it: it recalls you to the nearest bed to reality - or possibly your nearest bed to reality - in the region you are in.

Speaking for myself, i dont think the game really needs that feature for the one and only reason traveling is way to hard by now.

Implemenation of this WoR limitation also would need an implementation of appartment interconnects, and the possibility to buy an appartment in every not-very-small city.
(currently, there are no appartments available in Navar and Brest)))

I dont mind walking to (rather from) navar once or twice, but i really dislike the idea doing this many times. As is now, i take dragontransport to navar and recall to go back. This works fine.
With the WoR limitations, i wont leave Scorn at all, i think.

IMO this region idea makes sense, but the game is not ready for it yet for a reduction of WoR will result in players sticking in scorn.

Re: Regions

Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 10:33 pm
by poof
cavesomething wrote:... Oh, and ancient pupland would be its own region, word of recall does teleportation, not time travel. ...
I could not disagree more. Word of Recall, being a "deity" prayer, is not limited by time nor distance. There is no inconsistency with WoR being able to return one from Ancient Pupland to the last place one "slept" (save bed).

Bottom line: DO NOT CHANGE WORD OF RECALL! =P

Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2005 4:57 am
by mikeeusa22
>>What I want to know is if this plan is liked, and whether there is anything else I might need to consider.

It's well liked by me :)

(Note Cat2 hasn't been updated in a month or so because the compile failed... and then my laptop failed... however there have been no real map updates in CVS lately so it's ok :P)