Remapping of cities

In the quest for linearity and mapping in the game, the answer for towns and cities is clear and obvious: all rooms are the same size. I remapped and expanded the main city in Alter Aeon today, which really cleared up a lot of conflicts and has left no rooms on top of each other. It maps clean, and it wasn't even a lot of work. Here's an example of the client map for the new version:



There's lots of roads, lots of places for shops and other stuff, and a few dead spots to allow for expansion. Most of the player comments have been positive, which is surprising - generally anything that messes up someone's directions causes all kinds of havoc.

This doesn't address the issue of how to handle large expanses of space though, for example forests and other linkage areas. You really don't get an idea of how big the world is until you put into perspective the relative size of cities.

Take for example, my home town. It's a small town of 5-10k people, and from the recent Google maps it's a little over a mile in diameter. Meanwhile, the state in which in which it's located is around 250 miles in diameter (except that its squarish.) Take a penny and tape it to your wall. That's the size difference, and that's just one state, not an entire continent. For a continent, tape a quarter to skyscraper.

I'd like to think Ralnoth in the game is probably about the same size. The currently expanded Ralnoth is about 12 rooms wide and 25 tall; let's say 15 for the sake of argument. Meanwhile, the entire game is perhaps 400 rooms across and tall, neglecting portals to islands and the like. This makes the entire Alter Aeon mainland around 30 miles in diameter.

We have entire mountain ranges, jungles, swamps, other cities, and the shores of two oceans on the mainland. All within 15 miles of the central city of Ralnoth. Starting to see the picture?

A more reasonable continent size is on the order of 500-1000 miles. Even for a 500 mile wide continent, the scale of Ralnoth would imply walking through a minimum of 7500 rooms to get from one side to the other. This is probably not reasonable from a gameplay standpoint, so we need to find a different approach.

The simplest and easiest is to simply define cities to be much larger than they are. If we declare Ralnoth to be ten miles across instead of 1, we end up with a much more reasonable room count. But in that case, even the smallest house represents half a square mile of land area.

A better approach seems to be to change the size of roads and paths, such that the desired distances can be achieved. This kills the dull/boring wilderness areas and gets people out into the world to do something interesting.

I think there's a couple of different ways to handle this. One is to have different sized rooms and render them as best you can. Perhaps using terrain or other flags you can automatically decide what rooms are what size.

But it seems to me that a far better and easier way is to separate large and small sized zones from each other. When you leave one, you end up in the other with a different set of maps. For example, leaving a town shows the town zooming to a small size relative to the forest you're walking in. So many games have done this in the past, that it's a trivially obvious feature. It also happens to be a very good candidate for my overall mapping problems.

I'll let you all know if it works out.