GRANULARITY
Has anybody played Cataclysm? Extremely hard roguelike that does a great job with its map. There's something about Cataclysm that gives you an unbearable itch to explore instead of holing up in a gun store where it's safe. You can look at the screen and say: I'm the @, I'm in the bathroom of a house on a street in a town in a field by a river north of some woods. I don't think it actually tells you you're in the "bathroom", but you can see the @ is in a tiny closet with a toilet, so it's implied.
So if you could look at YASRI and say:
I'm the @
I'm in the kitchen (implied cause there's a stove? explicit because if the game knows to put a stove there it's no big shakes to attach the word "Kitchen"?)
The kitchen is in a house (explicit)
The house is on a street (explicit)
The street is in a district (implied, not named)
The district is in a borough (explicit)
The borough is in a city (explicit)
The city is an island surrounded by water and the @ can't swim
CIAISBW@CS
Ah "the City Is An Island Surrounded By Water and the @ Can't Swim", my old nemesis. "CIAISBW@CS" for short. It's a cheap, tired gaming cliche. It worked for me in Nexus Wars. It could also give a Manhattan/Venice feel to the city as opposed to a Paris/London one. It would also leave the city vulnerable to zeppelin sky pirates. My instinct is to embrace it and never think about it again.
GRANULARITY CONT'D
Anyway, you're always the @
you're always in a building
the building could be in a larger complex, like a barracks in a fort or a store in a mall
if you leave the building you're always on a street
except if you're in a park, or a graveyard, or a sewer, or a mysterious portal that leads to a ghastly dimension
these streets or places are always in a district
these districts are always in a borough
these boroughs are always in a city
except if you went through that mysterious portal
So there's:
person
room
building
complex
street or place
district
borough
city or ghastly dimension
hm, I guess ghastly dimensions have districts and boroughs too. Actually that could work if they had the proper names. Like your character could realize he'd dropped his pocketwatch in the Forest of Suicides on the Plains of Suffering in the Duchy of Azmodeus in the Terrible Dimension. Maybe not the borough part; it'd depend on how ghastly dimensions are constructed. Our game city should definitely be made of boroughs/districts/places/streets/buildings though.
PLACES THE @ CAN GO THAT ARE NOT STREETS OR BUILDINGS
Public parks for Tiruin
Beaches
Graveyards
Junkyards/dumps
Public squares/monuments
Barren fields/rubble filled empty lots (for finding bodies and getting attacked in)
Ghastly dimensions
Sewers/Catacombs
Natural Caverns
Airstrip for our zeppelins
The keep of a fort
Field of ancient stone heads
Lovely public garden
OBJECTS, INTERACTIVE FICTION
Toady's post today about billions of objects in adventure mode cities making impossible memory allocation demands leading to not completely persistent cities has me thinking maybe our game city shouldn't have billions of objects in it. A panel in the game interface reserved for interactive fiction-y descriptions could do some of the work that a hundred objects does in DF to describe, say, a gloom freak's lair. On the other hand, that's what's so cool about DF, it sets a scene by inference. Then again, a Stone Soup ascension involves a billion objects/kills/events and it's all persistent, or seems persistent.
EXAMPLE
It would be cool for an NPC to say "meet me in the Kitchen of the Marble Hotel on Wheel Street in Chelsea" or some suchlike.
So when I say "explicit" I mean the interface is telling you where you are, and "implicit" means that the area is a necessary map category that the player doesn't need to know about. A hotel must have a kitchen and a borough must have a lonely financial zone where the hotels are, but culturally there aren't necessarily signs that tell you these things.
Room (implicit?)
Building (explicit)
Street or Place (explicit)
District (implicit)
Borough (explicit)
City or Plane(explicit)
So to meet the NPC in above example you would have to find the kitchen by inference, as well as the lonely financial zone the Hotel is located in, which is easy since you have the street and borough name, and the kitchen probably has a stove in it.
It's a lot to think about, but it's fun to think about.
Author
Topic: Yet Another Stupid Roguelike Idea (Read 8401 times)