A layer below

[Salt Merchant]

One of the important features of Arm is the "seamless" terrain. The land obeys simple Cartesian geometry, such that it's impossible to, for example, go north six times, west once, south once, and end up where one started.

This suggests the possibility of an "underlayer". Okay, please note this is not meant to be a discussion about what does and does not currently exist in Zalanthas, but rather an implementation approach to adding a sub-surface layer to the world. A room could be created to mirror each room above as part of the same "zone".

What's the point? Digging can then be coded, for one thing. Not the "one man digs for five minutes and finds the buried fortune" kind of digging, but:

-a large team effort to excavate a ruin or structure below (including removing and hauling off large quantities of dirt/rock/soil)

-mining and the indication of ore-rich rock

-creation of a well if the underlayer room is flagged to hold water

-tunneling beneath structures/walls

-quarries

-implementation of huge sandstorms burying or partially burying things like wagons and camps, or in rare events even a village (picture transferring it to the layer below and defining a new top layer)

-mass graves hinted at by a few bones on the surface layer

-rationalization of cavern systems with the surface

-interaction between the surface and the below (for example, a long but thin crack through which only small flying creatures pass, issuing out as a swarm into the dusk sky each night, and hunkering below in a fissure during the day)

-a new place for mudsex (you'd sold now, right?)

-plus whatever else unfettered imaginations will invent when given new tools to work with

[Larrath]

I think the possibility of digging is awesome.
However, I don't want to see it as a coded thing, because then you could have a group of, say, five or six twinks walking around digging everywhere until they find all the rich treasure.

I'd be more comfortable if this was based on logs and emails, same as construction.

[EvilRoeSlade]

Somehow I doubt implimenting this would distract twinks from their pastime of sparring and looking for twinkish ways to kill other players.  Furthermore, somehow I doubt the implimentation of an under-layer would cause the staff to suddenly stock the world with treasure.  You might find a few useful scraps if you do some digging, but what's wrong with that?

I'm all for it.

[Xygax]

Unfortunately, Armageddon does -not- actually adhere to perfect Cartesian rules.  Simple evidence of this can be collected by walking across a city, and then leaving the walls of that city and circling around to the other side.  One trip is codedly much shorter than the other.  Of course, the reply to this is that we should somehow special-case cities, or city-zones, but unfortunately zones often bleed into other locations in order to achieve some particular coded behavior or attribute, and so are often deceptive with respect to an idea like this.

Worse still, even within areas of the same "scope", there are still "bugs" in the geography (or should I say geometry?) of the world which would break what you suggest here.  Also, the world's builders seem to have very much envisioned it from a sort of two-and-a-half-dimensional perspective, and so the Cartesian rules are even more broken in a lot of places below and above the ground (some places are slowly improving in this regard, but we're not There Yet).

Ideally, the world should actually -have- coordinates specifying (X,Y,Z) location in the world.  This would make any number of search/find algorithms work better, AND it might enable something along the lines of what you're suggesting as well as enabling people (maybe) to use magick/seige engines/tools to destroy or deform the world, breaking walls down, building their own structures and cities, etc.

We're not there yet, and we need a lot more data to get there, as well as needing some useful technique for blending our "room-based" geography and text with something more 3D.

-- X

[Socko]

This is an insanely radical idea. I like it a lot.. the game-world, for all we know, is riddled with ruin and possible 'archeological' finds. Even if what's going to be dug up is utterly useless, it's still cool, and even practical.

I could definitely see it  being used for dredging water or carving out an underground siege tunnel, at that.

Even if the game isn't ready for this brand of complex code, it's still a nice thought.

[jhunter]

I'm for the idea but I'd rather see more of an upper layer added first, mainly to the cities.

[Xygax]

Even if the game isn't ready for this brand of complex code, it's still a nice thought.

I'm sorry if my post was misleading:  it's not really an issue of "complex code" so much as it is an issue of incorrect or incomplete data.  A lot of data would need to be fixed, enhanced, or re-normalized to make this work.

-- X

[Socko]

No worries, Xygax. That's what I meant-- or would've liked to have meant. Still, I understand that it's a ton of work. :oops:

[Synthesis]

I'm thinking some sort of 3D visualization software would be useful for maintaining and interpreting the vast amount of data that the game contains.

For personal use, I've compiled a pretty decent 2D "map" using a spreadsheet application, using a separate set of sheets to keep track of up/down locations, and almost all of the area I have mapped out "lines up" correctly on a 2D grid system. But something like the visuals in this...

http://www.nsf.gov/cise/cns/darema/dd_das/ew_ing/sld001.htm

...would be insanely awesome, and an extremely powerful tool for the staff, I'm thinking.  If you could adapt it from geophysical survey data to the text output from the game...

In fact, just wandering with my train of thought, here...you could write a program/script to automatically create a gigantic 3D grid system in the program, then another program to "rip" room-exit data from the game's code to automatically generate a rough-draft 3D model of the game world.  After that, you'd have to go room by room and iron out any quirks, but the quirky areas would be much more easily identified once they're arranged visually.

Not to mention all the data you could input and sort in such a system...you could set up scripts to track player movement in and out of areas, kill frequencies, frequency of player deaths in certain areas, frequency of emotes/other commands in certain areas...have it all sorted and have the pertinent data in question represented visually, instead of textually...Big Brother is Watching, heh.

Pipe dreams, of course...but man, that'd be some crazy shit.

Edited to add:

In fact, the simple creation of a 3D spreadsheet application would be an interesting project for a programmer to take up, and it would be immediately applicable to the game.  All it would immediately need is the simple ability to color individual cubes (like the background color of a 2D cell), alignment of text in three dimensions, the ability to rotate or change views...well...I guess there are a lot of things it would need, but hey, figuring all that out is half the fun!

[Halaster]

Funny you mention that, Synthesis, but Raesanos has already written a staff tool not unlike what you're describing.  A staff member can go in and enter a zone number, a range of room numbers, and click a button and .. wala.. insta-map of that area.  Different types of geography (sectors) are color coded, up/down exits are handled properly, and so on.  Of course, this won't be made available to players, but it works great for us staff.

[Salt Merchant]

I hoped the "gnarly" wilderness areas had been smoothed out.

Nevertheless, by dropping the notion of being able to tunnel between rooms (i.e. by keeping it local to directly below the surface room) and by restricting this to the outdoors (i.e. outside centers of population), I believe most of the points above could still be enabled.

The only correspondence that would need to be established then is between the surface room and the "room" below.

The "room" below could have flags such as water content, rock strength (resistance to digging; some places could be flagged virtually impossible), rock type, ore type(s), ore quantity, skeleton content (chance of turning up a skull or some bone with each shovel full), skeleton type(s), etc. As well as potentially items (entrance to buried ruins revealed, wagons and wagon remains, broken statues lying on their sides... huge possibilities here). When enough digging was performed, a new room desc other than a generic pit could be revealed. Maybe it could even be staged so that as digging continues and the # of shoveful counter increases, the room desc changes between three or four descriptions.

Naturally, in most places digging would be pointless. Imm-placed hints (such as the tip of a buried obelisk protruding, exposed by the relentless winds) or an old scroll leading to a site might spark an excavation expedition. Any expedition better be prepared to defend itself, of course.

It also opens up the chance to have "diviners", looking for water (Vivaduans might naturally sense this, rangers and desert elves to a lesser extent), ore content (Zalanthas approximation of a geologist), or even ruins (Zalanthas approximation of an archeologist).

Could even implement "firestones" (coal content), useful in braziers, grills and roasting pits all around.

EDIT: Actually, tunneling could still be possible, just that by default it not be (too great a chance of collapse to allow significant progress, etc.). Flags to allow tunneling in a given direction could exist. Similarly, if it is inconvenient for someone to start a digging crew at a certain place because it's sort of above something already defined underground, the digging could be denied with a flag, with a message such as having the sand seep back into the pit being formed or a layer of tough granite just below the surface.