Discussion: Concept of space

[SwiftAusterity]

Nevermind the shadows on the cave wall we don't even know what the cave is made of yet. Plato is disappointed that he has no where to talk about how much socrates didn't know.

What is our concept of space? Rooms? Dimensional coords? A mix of things? My zone-locale-room design?

We must discuss!

[xenith]

I'm all for a combination of rooms and coordinates. Rooms for interesting zones (cities, caves), coords for the world. It's a bit more unique than a completely room based system.

Of course, if we wanted to be really unique and difficult to build, we could do completely coordinate based, and then we'd have to do fancy generated descriptions. ("You see a rock 10 feet to your left. It's a pretty rock.")

[rogersm]

+1 to a combination of rooms and coordinates. I'd love to have a mud set up in mythic Greece, and having coordinates for seafaring is extremely useful.

[SwiftAusterity]

Difficult I'm not so sure of. I had a mixed design for rooms plus coords and had coords working other thsn the proc gen. I'm for a mixture but we need a definitively solid design for where coords are used and where rooms are used. The greek seafaring thing sounds interesting. Seafaring or spacefaring makes sense for it. The two caveats to coords are "how does movement work if its text only" and "what can you do" (combat, can items be dropped, etc)

[rogersm]

My take is:

• The majority of the rooms have no coordinates. This is the standard mud/exit model

• Special rooms (what will be the sea in a seafaring mud) where there's a coordinate system. Some coordinate are also exits (seaports) to standard non coordinate rooms. We can start with simple coordinates (x, y, z) and let the people reprogram if they want something more complex. Obviosuly, if we define z=0, we have a 2d map.

  For movement I prefer some kind of subsystem (like sail east) rather than explicit coordinates (like move 2,5,0). But the sail east doesn't move an exact number of coords, but is the command that taking into account kind of boat, wind, etc... does the calculation and moves.

  For what you can do, commands need some kind of check that they're at sea, and apply custom logic.

[SwiftAusterity]

One of the movement things i had in my coords design was adding a "move towards landmark" command so you could head towards something and stop at it.

[xenith]

We talked about this in the slack channel, but the idea I envision is that the world is built on coordinates (similar to the overworld/wilderness system used in Medeivia), which encompasses land, sea, sky, etc.

Then for "interesting" zones, such as cities, dungeons, castles, tunnels, etc., you have room-based zones that have exits attached to specific coords. For example, the west gate of Midgaard is at coordinate 123,456,0, and going east from there drops you into the room. (And the reverse drops you back into the overworld.)

This also allows for procedurally generated zones, such as underwater dungeons/shipwrecks. Sort of an instanced dungeon system. You're sailing on the ocean, and at some point you decide to stop and dive. The game can then generate a random underwater dungeon for you to explore. (It can be persistent until fully explored/cleared.)

This kind of system doesn't really define navigational commands, but does allow for alternatives to the standard n/s/e/w system (sail west, walk towards ). That'd be something I would punt off until later, you can easily use the default navigation for the overworld to start.

Hopefully that explains my ideas, without going too far off-topic.