[Adonthell-devel] Waste's Edge for the v0.4 engine

[Kai Sterker]

Ingo posted two images on IRC today of some Waste's Edge graphics he
has converted to v0.4 resolution. I wouldn't have thought that things
go so quickly, so I better hurry and throw in what I would like to see
for the conversion. It's already been discussed a little on IRC before
and then I forgot to post it for everyone to see.

The idea is to have a single, seamless map without the transitions
that were in v0.3. That means, Redwyne Inn will not have special
interior (sub)maps for the individual rooms. Instead, on entering a
building, the engine would limit the map view to a range that will
allow to see the current floor. Walking up or down the stairs inside a
building would switch that range to the respective floor. Also,
walking up and down the stairs actually means walking up or down ...
no teleports as we had in v0.3. To make this work, there are a few
things to consider:

* Walls need to be cut at floor height (so that the complete upper
part of a building can be hidden). So we basically need to build floor
for floor.
* Doing it like that means that all rooms on the same level become
visible, unless we find a way to hide and show individual rooms
easily.
* Rendering needs to make visibility checks on objects, so that we
don't waste time actually drawing several interior floors that are
then covered by a roof if the player is outdoors.
* What range of the map would be visible at any given point must
somehow be stored as meta-data in the map itself.

Writing this down makes the whole thing look a bit harder than I would
have imagined, but I still think it might be worthwhile to implement.
It then would enable us to redesign the Redwyne Inn common room to
look like I had envisioned it from the beginning: being two stories
high, with a balustrade that leads to the rooms on the second floor.
For that we'd have to sacrifice the players room, but there should be
space for that under the roof instead. Attached 's a rough sketch of
what I have in mind.


Let me know what you think. Is this something to go for for the next
release (which might already be Waste's Edge for v0.4)? Or should we
postpone it and rather concentrate on tools and the engine parts that
are absolutely necessary to get Waste's Edge up and running?

Kai

common-room.jpg
Description: JPEG image