[Sawrock]

I like the idea, but akin to Skullcat's thoughts, limitations might make it hard to implement, I'd like to hear if there's a way around them though.

My idea was to just make more maps like the Forest we have between Cellsvich and the Arena. Giving more locations to RP while keeping the World Map still intact. Of course modifications to the world map would be needed so people can't just keep cutting around the areas like they do to the forest.

The maps wouldn't have to be massive, so hitting a limitation would be less likely.

That would eliminate all three of the advantages of this suggestion. (Edit: Apologies for the double-post.)

[Skullcatrons]

You've just reinforced my statement regarding to the size of Sigrogana. It's alone too massive, and too massive for even BYOND engine to properly handle that such impressive custom-by-custom size alone! Let me tell you something interesting.

The largest map I've came to seen myself, is the Spire of Agartha's Continent, which spans over 1000x850 - which translates into 850,000 tiles- on a single Z-level! The map file size of the Spire continent is nearly 10,000 KB - this excludes the expansion of new islands, and other things that came into play, slowly increasing the size file!

But that's not all- That map excluded NPCs, and players alike! Additionally, as Byond ENGINE slowly continues to upgrade. It may be possible- but to ask someone, which by the way, took a team of FOUR mappers alone, to map the 850,000 worth of tiles on a single Continent, excluding the number of tiles to make their cave! Your expectations for someone to work themselves down to the bone, and to create a massive world - which can then eventually induce massive lag!

What say you to this, Sawrock Wright?! Will you bring down a massive size of a map to a relatively small community of Sigrogana Legend 2- in which will confuse new players, and veterans alike trying to get around?!

[Rendar]

Honestly. I'd love a big map.

But uh.

It's already fuckin hard to find people now-a-days. I was on for about an hour earlier with 50 players on the server.

I ran into 1 other person in that hour.

I reallllyy don't want a map to be even BIGGER so that we can all just hide away and never see eachother again. I get why the desire for a big map is.. but the game does not sustain a playerbase to have the current world be filled up properly, and often times you just see a vast expanse of "this place is emptttyyy" because people aren't hanging out in public most of the time (and are in their houses, because lord. We have like 150+ houses in this game.)

[Sawrock]

(Post manually shrunk due to size reasons)

Honestly. I'd love a big map.

But uh.

It's already fuckin hard to find people now-a-days. I was on for about an hour earlier with 50 players on the server.

I ran into 1 other person in that hour.

I reallllyy don't want a map to be even BIGGER so that we can all just hide away and never see eachother again. I get why the desire for a big map is.. but the game does not sustain a playerbase to have the current world be filled up properly, and often times you just see a vast expanse of "this place is emptttyyy" because people aren't hanging out in public most of the time (and are in their houses, because lord. We have like 150+ houses in this game.)

Personally, I only encounter that problem when there's an event going on. Usually people are all either grouped up at the arena or Cellsvich, making little use of the alternate areas we have with the exception of housing, and the rare visit to Law's End or the Heaven and World Inn.

[Snake]

I kind of like this idea, but I have no proper idea to think on how this will make rebooting the game more smooth, it might increase the time it will take to load by a shit ton. Still! This is one thing we can all consider for a World Map Overhaul beta server in the future, if Dev is willing to implement this. We could start by testing the biggest size a map can take, and the impact it will have on reboot/loading the game.

There's also the bootleg version of this overhaul, which summarizes around slowing down the walk speed to a crawl times two (like when you're overencumbered, but twice as much) if you're in the world map, and then adding random encounters with random mobs that scale up to the player's level. And the chance of those encounters happening depends on the player's CEL, FAI and LUC%/ 'Shadow' boots or a new enchant. And then to travel faster, players can take a ride with the caravans (which will have normal walking speed), or ride horses (to make the speed just as fast as a encumberance crawl).

The clear downside, though, is that people might get lazy to travel around and only stick to Cellsvich forever (in which will completely monopolize the RP we wanted to spread around), or might make reaching BDPs a supreme drag. And at the same time, both of those are to be considered in every map overhaul.

[Shujin]

The community is currently to small, a bigger map while cool, will not help. It's a better idea to flash existing places out with stuff to do there.

And please lets not make walking around to find RP a even bigger hassle than it already is. Crawling around while being showered with random encounters is not fun at all.

[Exxy]

Honestly, I'm conflicted on this. I like Sawrock's idea with adding playable space, but at the same time the game has a lot of wasted real estate already. I would be much more on-board with the idea if the conversion was done to a continent as opposed to the entire world.


A pro or two that I don't really feel like Saw touched on was the possibility of removing/decreasing the amount of random-generated dungeons in favor of field-spawns instead (both monsters and harvestable things, like ore and lumber, etc). GMs could cause events (or just as random world events) that occur where there could be swarms of monster in an area and there'd be a notice given (either from NPC guards warning civilians to stay away from the roads to Dormeho, for example, or scouts placed along the roadways/townships to inform any would-be adventurer of any Black Door Phenomena in the nearby area).


A clear and immediate concern would be lag, but if dungeon generation was down-sized/removed it could take some tax off (how much it would ease the process is unknown, for all I know it could be irrelevant but it's just an idea to explore). A solution I'd be in favor of would be to "downsize" the world while we increase the size of a continent. We have a lot of great locations and lore but it's all far-spread and has a lot of dead space from each point of interest.

While "dead" space can be utilized in niche circumstances (for example, what they refer to as dead space in the latest Zelda installment helps a little bit in world-building) but in a game like SL2 I don't really feel like this would be an effective use of the aspect of size and scope. Another great example, I feel, would be Eternia (or more recently Spires in the time that I've lost interest in them) because of the fact while their game world is an enormous amount of space but they take a magnifying glass and focus on one continent or "location" instead of trying to stretch a blanket across a football field. What I'd propose is we take a magnifying glass to the continent of Sigrogana, adding more content to it and making it feel more lived-in than having everything spread across multiple continents that each with just a single place of interest. We have unexplored mountain ranges, (what appears to be) a bog/marsh, towns and areas along the river(?) that cut Sigrogana's continent in half. There could be snow-capped peaks with a village (or villages) on those mountain-ranged, nests for all sorts of creatures (who knows, maybe even a wyvern or two depending on how generous we decide to be with placement of things). The bog/marsh could hold the ruins of some forgotten town or city, and those weird clusters of rock (with what could be a spire) could hold a series of caverns [strike]that lead to jammer girls[/strike].

Something to keep in mind after reading this: I'm not saying we omit/pretend that other places like Lispool don't exist. I'm just trying to say I feel it would be time better spent to focus on a single continent than multiple. If that makes more sense.


Mobile/Placeable Housing
Not sure what to say on this. It can be hit or miss and it's already been tried once (and assumasbly failed, I can't really speak for how this feature played out since I wasn't really involved with the original SL). This is probably the only topic-idea I'm not psyched for. More of a selection would be nice, maybe smaller/unsafe housing, placed at certain points on the new world map after conversion or by the player (maybe limited to one house per IP/login-key or some such to avoid having the entire map filled with every character's home) based on Saw's idea at the conveinence of not needing a Player Shop House Key?


Dungeon/Player Detector
It's an idea. *shrug* Maybe something that tunes in to large amounts of Focus (only usable to track WIL-based characters) or sense disturbances in space/time/whatever-BDPs are made out. Rather see it as a one-use (for player characters) and three/five-use (for BDPs) variants.


Dungeons In-General
Perhaps instead of randomly-generated dungeons on the world map there could be a single location (this would help to server as a Hub and to help with the formation of parties). There could be an NPC or entrance that you enter as a group or individual and you create an instance from there (that can be joined or not by other players at said NPC/entrance) where there'd be a single floor generated at a time where instead of cores at the end, you have a sort-of "Ante" system, where you can cash out at the end of a completed floor or keep going and facing tougher/more enemies as you progress for greater/more rewards. This would allow you to be in a progressively random dungeon while only having one floor loaded at a time. Although this idea may be more of an idea for an entirely different topic (just thought it'd serve as an alternative to map-generated dungeons in-lieu of other ideas mentioned by Saw).


Caravan Raids
Yes please. Maybe also allowing Player Characters to defend them (against PCs or randomly generated bandit NPCs if opposing PCs aren't in the area).


Random World-Encounters
Please no.

Anyway, I would be 200% for this if we made the world of SL2 more compact while adding more content/spaced focused around a single continent (it's a fair trade-off I'd say). Hope this helped with the topic at hand to some degree.

Edit: Small wording change.

[DoctorMad]

Post edit: Sorry for my earlier condensing reply. I lurked the forums a bit to get the original etiquette better, so I hope that this will be taken as a sign of improvement.

[Post was manually shortened due to length]

[Sawrock]

I believe that....... two-million forty-eight thousand (2,048,000) tiles........ is manageable. (Words with emphasis added)

News! News! Player makes huge mistake, kills server.

I'd prefer if you replied with effort as opposed to slinging around emotional expressions. That tile number was in comparison to another Byond Game's tile number that happened to be a small bit larger. Note, I'm not saying that this suggestion wouldn't kill the server, but I'm not saying it would either. What I'm saying is that if you plan on responding to this sort of suggestion, I'd appreciate if it was properly worded to encourage good discussion.

A pro or two that I don't really feel like Saw touched on was the possibility of removing/decreasing the amount of random-generated dungeons in favor of field-spawns instead (both monsters and harvestable things, like ore and lumber, etc). GMs could cause events (or just as random world events) that occur where there could be swarms of monster in an area and there'd be a notice given (either from NPC guards warning civilians to stay away from the roads to Dormeho, for example, or scouts placed along the roadways/townships to inform any would-be adventurer of any Black Door Phenomena in the nearby area).

That's another benefit that I haven't thought of.

[Rendar]

For the most part, I wouldn't think dungeons are actually much of an issue, since they don't actually load unless someone enters them (and NPCs don't move/exist as a side note).

Before it was an issue, and made the server lag a fuckkkkton.

I will say though. I actually read what you posted (because I had missed it, oops) and.. every tile being a 32x32 zone on Sigrogana overworld is.. Very much not in the right direction, in my mind. Camps fulfill this, as of right now, whilst also allowing for RP opportunities therein. It also signals to folks that there is either

A) RP going on there
or
B) Someone is there.

If the game was on a smaller scope, consisting of Sigrogana alone, I'd definitely be more into this, but considering it spans across 5 continents right now, with entire cities occupying 1 tile on the overworld (and the capitol of the country being a 3x3).. I don't think having 1 tile = 32x32 map is that realistic. Of course, I know you were just spitballing a number, which is fine.

I don't think, as of current, we have the playerbase to sustain something like this... Sorry, Saw.

As for what Exxy said.

GMs can already 'cause' events, as it were. Saw did it plenty of times with random birds that extended from the sky. They can very easily simply set up a camp and have it be something sinister. Just like any player could. If you mean Black Beast Attacks.. well. That would require Dev to make a system for that, but that's another topic for somewhere else (A really good topic though.)