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[pspeed]

Last night I got a first pass at automatic town/city placement and the routes (land and sea) between them. Still needs work but progress is progress.

http://i.imgur.com/34z7i.jpg


The yellow would be highways and the light blue would be shipping routes.

The biggest issue is that ports and roads aren't yet reused as much as they should be.  And while I'm ok with this for roads (and it's a tougher problem to solve than it sounds), it's quite unacceptable for ports which would actually require construction, resources, etc... and basically shape the whole make up of the area.

The best example of this is the island of Icewell on the right side.  Now, that's a pretty big island, don't let this scale confuse you... but it still doesn't deserve three separate ports.  It's almost big enough to support two small towns but it really needs to have only one port.

So I'll be playing with that a little more.

I had a problem laying out buildings on towns without understanding what the main routes through the town would be.  There is an interesting chicken and egg problem otherwise.  (Need to know its proper size for placement.  Need to know building orientation to know its proper size.  Need to know where the roads are to know proper orientation for a location.  Need to know where the buildings are to place the roads...)

[Michael]

Please, as an idea, make there be more land 

[FutureB]

i dont think there needs to be, once paul adds the difernt climates i think hes going to make a large barron desert/waste land scarered around but i think they should be a few thasound blocks seperate from another desert and therefor make people explore the world more and fall in love with the sights you can see lol

[pspeed]

From the facebook feed because I didn't feel like retyping basically the same answer:  

[ahmadsal]

I personally think the land is fine. There may be some bigger islands to cater to terrains but that shouldn't be too much of a problem. You should place bigger towns more inward from the coast (and maybe build two or three small port cities that receive the trade. Most of the adventure should be on land and you need to make it more acceptable to walk across a continent rather than taking a ship around everywhere. If you ever go about adding interactive weather, maybe storms will happen, making water travel hazardous. Instead, there should be a better balance geared toward highways with only larger cities, port towns, or resource deprived regions importing from abroad the sea.

That's just my opinion though. I know you probably have your own opinion but discussion, even if pointless, is almost always a good thing.

[pspeed]

I personally think the land is fine. There may be some bigger islands to cater to terrains but that shouldn't be too much of a problem. You should place bigger towns more inward from the coast (and maybe build two or three small port cities that receive the trade. Most of the adventure should be on land and you need to make it more acceptable to walk across a continent rather than taking a ship around everywhere. If you ever go about adding interactive weather, maybe storms will happen, making water travel hazardous. Instead, there should be a better balance geared toward highways with only larger cities, port towns, or resource deprived regions importing from abroad the sea.

That's just my opinion though. I know you probably have your own opinion but discussion, even if pointless, is almost always a good thing.

It's always a trade off and I can easily weight route discovery towards or away from sea travel... it's surprising how little the costing has to change to really favor land.  Earlier I made a small bug in the costing calculation and suddenly there was almost no sea travel and the land was criss-crossed with roads and bridges over the shallows (I was glad to see that part work... but still.)

The issue is that with current land sizes all of the wilderness gets gobbled up.  When there are mobs and cool wild things it will be a balancing issue keeping all of that "wild feeling".  It's no fun if you always feel like civilization is just through that stand of trees.

The current Mythruna terrain is definitely water-rich so it's realistic to assume that most towns would be port or near-port towns and sea travel would be very common.  Things will change when I add real ports.  Right now the route finding just assumes that if there is a good place for a port then one will get made.  Later, ports will be specifically selected and then all land->sea transitions must go through the preassigned ports.  This will skew things a little more towards road-building in a lot of places.  Hopefully not too many, though.

[ahmadsal]

After looking at the map some more and comparing distances, I think most of the things you mentioned are already included. I remember trying to walk straight to where Vertcastle is and that is a long walk. Actually, except for that one city, I don't see any ports. More hours sitting there working down to the precise details are still planned I bet! Great job though. Terrain will definitely change lots of the small details so I guess you shouldn't worry about some of the things at all and simply get the holistic engine working perfectly.

[BenKenobiWan]

After looking at the map some more and comparing distances, I think most of the things you mentioned are already included. I remember trying to walk straight to where Vertcastle is and that is a long walk.

If I'm correct, Spawn to Vertcastle is around 1 km. That's not very long, even considering the faster time in Mythruna.

[pspeed]

After looking at the map some more and comparing distances, I think most of the things you mentioned are already included. I remember trying to walk straight to where Vertcastle is and that is a long walk.

If I'm correct, Spawn to Vertcastle is around 1 km. That's not very long, even considering the faster time in Mythruna.

1000 meters at 3 meters / sec (running) is 333 seconds... or about 5.5 minutes (5.5 hours in Mythruna time)... if you could run in a straight line.

Still, it's a pretty long walk over terrain.  I  can push them out farther but it starts to get pretty tedious to get around.  I think the current distance will be good  until I have bigger land masses.  As it stands, city to city (versus town to town) will be 10-15 game hours of walking, ie: a full days travel... and that's about what I wanted for this cut.

[pspeed]

Note: my math was wrong on at least one count... 3 meters per second is the walk speed.  Run is 4.5 but in the real game you wouldn't be able to run the whole way without taking a break.

I finally have a path plotted between two towns so I walked it.  The towns are about 1000 meters apart and I started at 6:00 AM game time and finished at 2 PM.  If I get time to check some other paths, I will report back.

...but half a day between towns is sort of what I wanted to get 1 day+ between cities.  I actually don't care how far apart cities are as long as it is rare that they are closer than one day apart.

[pspeed]

It took about 5 game hours to run all the way back.

[Teknonick]

Paul, don't worry about it being tedious.... Because, you 'will' be adding horses, carts, ships, stuff like that! Soooo... Those would be able to double, if not triple the movement speed for most cases! But still, nice to hear about what's going on ! Can't wait for alpha!!

[BigredRm]

I will live near Ironoine.

[Michael]

I'm way off of the map 

[pspeed]

I'm way off of the map 

Hmmm... what coordinates?