Introducing...a bit of a city. City generation is working, due to the work of our brilliant coder Lap.
Anyone who thinks they can make even a quick, low quality floor or wall, please do so. Make the world varied.
City generation is now functioning! It was a huge bitch, and it just might be the hardest part of this entire project, which is great news for moving forward! Let's populate this world!
What we need now are tons of floor and wall tiles. We also need people to draw out far more ascii maps of places.
Before we get too carried away we need to determine the scale of the world. In the screenshot above, I have the average city street as 5 tiles wide. Should it be 2? 4? 6? 8?
Keep in mind the following things will almost certainly be only 1 tile big:
Most doors
People
Items
The size of things like multi-tile furniture and beds will depend on how big we scale everything. Let's figure out the scale and then get cranking on content.
There's two mutually exclusive factors here.
ReplyDeleteRealistically a person takes up a 1 foot by 1 foot square, although it's tight. So we decide on 2x2 to give a little breathing room.
At 2x2, your standard "one lane each way" street is going to be about 15-20 tiles wide. That's without sidewalks and parking spaces. Parking spaces will be an additional 4 to 5 tiles (each side).
This is simply huge for a game, it takes a lot of memory to store this level of detail, most times the player doesn't care, AND it takes forever to walk across.
Bumping up to a 5x5 tile, you begin to lose definition. Beds become 1 tile, doors are always 1 tile (even double doors IRL), hallways are one tile, but large distances become manageable (standard road is 3-4 tiles, plus 1 per parking-space-width).
5x5s are good "combat space" tile sizes because if you're swinging around a 2 foot piece of steel, you're going to want a lot of space, and people can't move around you very well. But they're terrible for depicting things like a kitchen full of drawers where you pull out a knife, sneak up behind someone, and slit their throat: you need more detail, closer quarters, and greater maneuverability.
But at the same time, too small of resolution means people will have to hold down a key for several seconds in order to walk down the street.