Re: Mutilple maps?

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Stanley Sutton wrote:
> 
> Actually I was thinking of multiple scale maps, such as strategic and
> tactical levels, but supporting 3D would be nice, also.  I suspect that
> doing both won't be much more work than doing either serpeatly. :-)
> 
> Just glancing at the code, a good first step might be to replace all the
> explict x and y dependancies with a co-ordinate struct, which would
> support both multiple co-ordinates and scales.

>From hard experience, I should say that this approach, while
having the appeal of greater abstraction in the code, doesn't
work very well in practice.  What typically happens that the
abstraction is easy to understand and implement, you do it, but
then the real purpose of the abstraction is hard to implement and
never gets done.  Xconq is littered with hundreds of these - clouds
for instance, which have map layers, GDL, etc, but there isn't any
way for a game to use them (I originally had the idea of using them
to protect parts of a battlefield from air attack and maybe ranged
fire, but that part was never done).

In the case of multiple maps, you should decide what they're for,
how the player will play them (multiple displays? split-screen?),
how units transition between (intra-cell stack? exit portals?),
how GDL applies (speed can be adjusted for scale, but what about
adjacency tests?), and how algorithms such as path finding should
work.  It's not a good idea to start tinkering with the code unless
you have a moderately detailed answer to all these sorts of questions.

Personally, I think the multiple interlinked map idea could be made
to work, but the multiple-scale idea is too hard and would stress
the already-overgeneralized game framework too much.

Stan

> -----Original Message-----
> 
> From:   Hans Ronne [mailto:hronne@pp.sbbs.se]
> 
> Sent:   Mon 17-Jun-02 15:35
> 
> To:     Stanley Sutton
> 
> Cc:     xconq7@sources.redhat.com
> 
> Subject:        Re: Mutilple maps?
> 
> >Is anyone doing any work on multiple level maps currently?  Is so, do
> 
> >you need help?  If not, do you need someone to start working on it?
> 
> You mean a 3D map like in D&D? I guess it could be implemented as
> multiple
> 
> areas on top of each other that are connected at certain points. Would
> take
> 
> a lot of coding, though. Certainly not something I'm working on.
> 
> This would also raise some interesting AI problems. Should the game only
> 
> load and play one area (where you are) at a time? This would be like in
> D2
> 
> where nothing really happens when you are not around. Or should the game
> 
> try to play all levels at the same time? I guess the latter is more or
> less
> 
> unavoidable in a multiplayer game.
> 
> All in all, this is a huge task. But if you want to give it a try,
> please
> 
> go ahead :-).
> 
> Hans
> 
> Hans Ronne
> 
> hronne@pp.sbbs.se