Business And Economy Archive
Thread: Resource Installations should be able to be places anywhere.
Coran_Sienar wrote:
Kaessa wrote:
Any structure that gets placed in my city requires zoning rights. If someone wanted to greif my city by placing a medium harvester in the middle of the main street, I don't thingk 15k or even 150k would slow them down. No thank you, I think most mayors would want you to ask someone first.If you had an option to set the price an an option to deny outright as the city mayor, I think it would still work. That's one of the reasons that vendors are used for storage. No one is going to buy a mystery bag for 999999999 credits.
True, but the inability to control where in the city it would be placed leaves you with the same problem. I have a "planned" city, we moved to the location and placed things in the configuration that we felt was the best overall. It would really suck to have someone plop a harvester right down in the middle of town square because there was a killer spawn of something that they'd be willing to pay highly for.
I don't know about other mayors, but even a 500k "fee" wouldn't make me comfortable. Plus, I have no way to make them leave once they're done. Too much potential for damage, I think, I wouldn't want to take the risk. I think most mayors would feel the same way. It's something that would help the people trying to place the harvesters.. but it's not going to help the city at all.
Khristen wrote:
While NPC camps and such can alter the terrain, they do so only temporarily. It doesn't create a huge strain on the graphics/terrain and there are places even NPC camps can't spawn.
The problem with applying this same technology to a harvester or a structure is that it has the potential to become a permanent structure. It alters the terrain in a much more profound way. Think of the placing grid for structures: green is buildable, red is no-build, and yellow is a temporary change. A structure turns green to red while an NPC camp turns green to yellow. Both can absorb a certain amount of red into its footprint, but a certain number of those squares has to be green in order to change. The red is more intensive, detailed ground that is a fundamental part of the terrain; you can only change it so much before it alters the graphics too profoundly.
The graphics we see in SWG is comprised of many, many layers of images piled on top of each other. Each structure's footprint determines what layer it's placed into so that it looks right when added into the actual game world. If that footprint places too low on average, you get buried structures. If that footprint places too high on average, you get collosal towers. The look of a structure as part of the terrain is important because it's permanent. The look of an NPC camp can be a little strange if it spawns in a weird area because it's not going to be there very long.
Harvesters don't have a foundation that they sit on like houses do, so it doesn't have a "filler" to cover uneven ground. They'd have to completely change the artwork and code to allow harvester placement anywhere, not just on the structure but on the terrain as well. It's not simply a matter of not allowing it.
The same prinicpal that is applied to camps can be applied to harvesters. Any change to the environment, temporary or not, is still a change. Mission spawns that cover trees or rocks can sometimes remain for hours or days in the same location simply because a player neglects to finish it. Camps covering similar objects could be placed down for days at a time if its owner remained in it. The fact is that no major changes occur when any of these things are placed. I have seen random spawns of NPC's that dig out a groove in a mountainside so large that the houses at the top of the mountain had 4 more flights of steps added to them. Once the camp was gone, the mountain returned to its original shape. Harvesters that could flatten out land in the same way that camps do would have very little effect on any of the current game graphics.
The fact is that the terrain in this game is quite malleable in some cases. For the greatest evidence of this fact, go to Endor Research Outpost with a camp kit. Go to the nearby lake and find the smallest piece of land in the middle of the water. Place a camp kit there and watch as that piece of land you could barely stand on magically turns into an ideal fishing spot several times bigger than it was at first.