Maps discoveries.

[DeletedUser]

Oh, I like that! Cartographer, yeah... and the more you reveal, the more jobs become available (by being revealed) nearby, drawing more people. "Exploration" could even be a job to be worked at (or at least starting from) the cartographer's office. Lots of possibilities here.

Very cool -- someday.

well my idea was more along the lines of each level of cartographer would reveal 4sectors. If you leave your town then you keep the map for 36 hours or untill you join a dffrent town in which you would now have its map. Aditionaly starting players have knowlage of 1 sector.

using this method the amount of maps needed is at a minimum(50)

 

[DeletedUser]

I don't think it's a good idea, simply because there will be too much of a dark area around the player. If they venture far away from their town or they leave their town, then will the rest of the map be dark to them? Will they be able to save already discovered sections of the map or will it revert?

Lots of games start with a dark map which gets lit up as it's explored. However, if you dislike that, then you do; that's a matter of individual taste and as such is not debatable. :nowink:

There are different ways this could be implemented, so there isn't a right or wrong answer to your questions at this time. FWIW, my expectation would be that any area you've been to would stay lit up -- at least, it wouldn't be black. It could be "fog of war" dimmed, but it certainly shouldn't revert to black. You've been there, so you now know at least the terrain, if not who/what is on it at a given moment. Job sites would stay, since those don't change. Towns... debatable; if FoW, then they would probably stay on the dimmed area until the player returns (or otherwise receives updated info), even if at some point they are abandoned.

This is all just fantasy until we find out if it's even reasonable. Since we don't know that, I'd suggest we just table the whole discussion for later and focus on the stuff that's more immediately doable/needed.

 

[DeletedUser]

well my idea was more along the lines of each level of cartographer would reveal 4sectors. If you leave your town then you keep the map for 36 hours or untill you join a dffrent town in which you would now have its map. Aditionaly starting players have knowlage of 1 sector.

using this method the amount of maps needed is at a minimum(50)

So you're envisioning the map revelation to occur on a sector-by-sector basis? Would the cartographer reveal the sectors N, S, E & W of its own sector, then?

If the sector is defined as the smallest unit of map to be revealed/unrevealed, then the amount of data involved would be extremely small. However, I also think it would be somewhat less interesting than a tile-by-tile exploratory method. But again, this is a discussion we could table for now.

 

[DeletedUser]

yes i was thinking one in each direction . although a Line of Sight would be more ideal you come across the problem of thousands of individual maps which would be more complicated.

 

[DeletedUser]

This idea doesn't necessarily requires multiple maps. What you get is an overlay of bits, one bit per player per tile -- or, in your concept, one bit per player per sector, which is virtually nothing (40 bits = 5 bytes per player per world!). The map itself is unchanged; the system decides which parts of it to show to the player based on that player's map revelation overlay data.

You would have multiple maps, at least partially, if FoW were enabled, and towns were "remembered" in their current size-state per player. However, even that doesn't amount to an entire map per player. You'd only need -- in addition to the tile revelation overlay -- a table of last known town status records, with a record looking like this:

Field1: WorldID
Field2: PlayerID
Field3: TownID
Field4: TownSize

Then when, say, player #245 looks at his map, the server looks up which towns in the current sector are at what size in player #245's "map memory", and shows them in that size in the FoW. It really would not be all that big of a table (maybe a few hundred records per player at most, on average), and it wouldn't produce much (if any?) network traffic at all.

I'd forgotten how much fun database design can be.

 

[DeletedUser]

I think young players may have many against.... The older ones saw all the map, all cities (well when I started this game there were no cities.... ) But I think this may be changed a little: During a job (exdploration for example, a character may find a job spot with special location. For example indian village, and jobs:

1. trading with indians and
2. pillage the village , team job (search for team jobs in dev. discussions), 50% cash, 15% exp, 65% luck, 100% danger)....

So map discoveries and occur during certain jobs: exploration, beaver hunt (search near the river), buffalo hunt (you must find buffalo first, any you may find something else), covote hunt (same as buffalo), cowboy (while riding you may see something), and ... every job that requires movement?

 

[DeletedUser]

Your wording is somewhat hard to follow in this post. I'll take my best shot at it; you tell me if I've gotten something wrong.

I think young players may have many against.... The older ones saw all the map, all cities (well when I started this game there were no cities.... )

You mean new players would object since they would start off with no map, but the existing players already have the map? I'd say that would be a major objection, and would mean that this should only be rolled out in new worlds (unless some way of making it more fair can be thought of for existing worlds).

But I think this may be changed a little: During a job (exdploration for example, a character may find a job spot with special location. For example indian village, and jobs:

1. trading with indians and
2. pillage the village , team job (search for team jobs in dev. discussions), 50% cash, 15% exp, 65% luck, 100% danger)....

So map discoveries and occur during certain jobs: exploration, beaver hunt (search near the river), buffalo hunt (you must find buffalo first, any you may find something else), covote hunt (same as buffalo), cowboy (while riding you may see something), and ... every job that requires movement?

You mean have some jobs, but not others, allow for discovery of parts of the map? I'd have to think about that. It would be a benefit for those jobs, which would thus require some re-balancing of all the jobs/rewards. Not sure what I think of that.

 

[Red Falcon]

Man! This is all so confusing! There are some abbreviations I still don't know the meaning of. Like FoW and FWIW. Though I think FoW means Fog of War. But what is a fog of war? Is that a game of some kind?

 

[DeletedUser]

no fog of war is when you have no knowlage of the surounding area and must discover it.

 

[DeletedUser]

Man! This is all so confusing! There are some abbreviations I still don't know the meaning of. Like FoW and FWIW. Though I think FoW means Fog of War. But what is a fog of war? Is that a game of some kind?

Sigh. So easy to answer your own question! :dry:

 

[Red Falcon]

Instead of making up a new thread for this idea, I will simply post it in this thread. I think that if a player is a member of a town, then the map should be automatically centered on that town when they open up the map page. It is kind of annoying the way it is now, because the map is made out of sections and if your town is on the edge of one of those sections then when you go to search for a job, you have to go to the 'next page' to see if there are any jobs you selected close to your town. And when you go to the next page, you cannot see your town. Therefore you cannot properly judge the distance between that job and your town. If this has already been brought up, then please forgive me for not doing enough research, because I did research this first.

 

[DeletedUser]

Instead of making up a new thread for this idea, I will simply post it in this thread. I think that if a player is a member of a town, then the map should be automatically centered on that town when they open up the map page. It is kind of annoying the way it is now, because the map is made out of sections and if your town is on the edge of one of those sections then when you go to search for a job, you have to go to the 'next page' to see if there are any jobs you selected close to your town. And when you go to the next page, you cannot see your town. Therefore you cannot properly judge the distance between that job and your town. If this has already been brought up, then please forgive me for not doing enough research, because I did research this first.

That would be helpful, but could mean a lot of programming. I'm not sure about that though.

If it's not tough to do, I'm certainly in favor of that.