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keyspace / Cataclysm-DDA

Cataclysm - Dark Days Ahead. A fork/variant of Cataclysm Roguelike by Whales.
http://en.cataclysmdda.com/
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Distance, scale, and reference points #2

Open keyspace opened 7 years ago

keyspace commented 7 years ago

Issues mentioning scale often get derailed, so dropping here instead.

keyspace commented 7 years ago

https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/20040#issuecomment-273107042

Clarify: too lenient/restrictive because tiles don't give real-world granularity. Correct?

No, it's more because tile size changes depending on context. Cities span barely hundreds of tiles, distance per cities is at most an order of magnitude greater.

I've always thought of them as rural towns: one-two floor houses, small businesses and all...

Distance between "cities" with default settings might seem small indeed, but not so much if CITY_SPACING is increased. Been playing with 8 lately, but 6 looks good, too.

A realistic formula would need to assume one particular size of tile. Calculating tile size from running speed would be the most objective and straightforward, but also the most misleading and horribly lenient way of calculating it, while inter-city distance would probably feel to punishing.

One of many recent scale tangents has brought up 2 meters.

KG touched on changing turn time to 1 second two comments later.

(Searching also brought up this oldie from Summer 2014.)

This is all related. Context-dependent tile sizes work just fine, - until reference points (that can be related to game-external experience) are presented. These are the triggers for cognitive dissonance:

  1. the clock - to everybody;
  2. the speed readout while driving a vehicle (often coupled with a clock) - next to everybody;
  3. firearm range - mostly to those familiar with them;
  4. fuel consumption, to a minor extent; ?. More?

Note how there's little dissonance:

  1. while there's a "sun dial" and things take "half a noon" or "several days";
  2. with vehicle proportions;
  3. while there's no ranged weapons, or only primitive ones;
  4. while it doesn't get gobbled up.
keyspace commented 7 years ago

I feel that re-inventing the wheel like this will invariably put vehicles back on square one - endlessly attempting to balance parts to "feel right".

It's not really reinventing the wheel. There is no formula that calculates acceleration from mass and engine power directly. There are multiple problems along the way, such as air resistance, aerodynamics that aren't just pure resistance, mass distribution etc. You can't just slap a V12 on a bicycle and break the sound barrier.

Yup, wanted to write something to same effect, but decided to go for brevity, since OT in that issue. Overly-verbose lately. :/

Partial realistic simulation is generally the worst choice possible.

Agreed! That's why "either suspend disbelief, or re-construct reality" (but not both - dissonance again).

We can't use realistic formulas because they won't give realistic results without other realistic formulas. So we'd need to rip out the current system and replace it with a "realistic" one, which in turn would clash with other systems.

Yup! 👍