Cities And Housing Archive
Thread: Streets and sidewalks
Neyhod wrote:
in previous posts/chats et cetera the devs indicated they are not going to add streets of any kind.
neyh'od
Ah - but with the new found sense of direction SOE has found lately, it could be very possible! They seem to be listening to great suggestions (like this one) and implimenting them to make this game better and more fun. And paved player cities aredefinately a great step in the right direction.
RandAiden wrote:
Obo_alCan wrote:
I don't know how hard it would be to do, but I'd at least like to see the terrain of the ground in the city changed to something more city like.
for example, I was messing around with the texture files and did this...
Player City Paved 1
Player City Paved 2
Yes! - this is what player cities should look like. Not just some rag-tag collection of buildings surrounding a skyscraper in the middle of the wilderness.
Hmm...clickys didn't tranfer...sorry. Please see the original post.
Message Edited by RandAiden on 02-05-2005 11:18 AM
Yeah, I agree entirely. Those pictures look amazing, the only thing is on Dantooine, there is no pavement there, so even if it was flat that would be a lot better. I had to drop my guild hall, when I had my own city, about 200m away from town because there was no place to drop it. I got really lucky when I moved to my current town to find a spot for my shop. The only way to do that now is to drop a factional base and then when you drop the base...the base is in the way of anything you wanted to place. I remeber when a mission was by my harveters and all you saw was the top of the harvester going up and down (lol).
sashimiforme wrote:
Dubolom wrote:
Newmoon wrote:The thing I hate about player cities is the lack of landscaping ...the mayor or assigned architect should be able to lower and rase the land sorta like Populous to make truly beatutiful cities or outpost .....allow sidewalks , Fortifying walls Streets ...imagine the possibilities!
Actually, I think land should be flattened automatically for the appropriate radius of the city when you place a city hall ... this is already implemented for camps, should be easy to apply to city halls. Another thing city hall placement can do automaticaly is cover the entire radius of the city with Coronet-like "pavement". And when you place a house that pavement is removed from under the house just like grass and trees are removed now.Message Edited by Dubolom on 01-31-2005 03:05 PM
Completely agree. Theres two little hills smack dab in the middle of my city that I cant put anything on. lol annoys the crap outa me. And we have a few gardens that look like they're being eaten by the ground. lol maybe I should plop some camps down.
I agree also maybe add a concrete base to the house footprint and flatten the land so i row of houses would look like a street. As to the SW feel, perhaps this can only be done on planets like Corellia,Rori,Talus and Naboo but houses on tat and dant just flatten the land and make be part of the landscape. Just my two bob.
Raz Indeli
Exactly!
Dubolom wrote:
Actually, I think land should be flattened automatically for the appropriate radius of the city when you place a city hall ... this is already implemented for camps, should be easy to apply to city halls. Another thing city hall placement can do automaticaly is cover the entire radius of the city with Coronet-like "pavement". And when you place a house that pavement is removed from under the house just like grass and trees are removed now.
Message Edited by Dubolom on 01-31-2005 03:05 PM
RandAiden wrote:
Neyhod wrote:
in previous posts/chats et cetera the devs indicated they are not going to add streets of any kind.
neyh'od
Ah - but with the new found sense of direction SOE has found lately, it could be very possible! They seem to be listening to great suggestions (like this one) and implimenting them to make this game better and more fun. And paved player cities aredefinately a great step in the right direction.
Sadly, it has nothing to do with SOEs direction and everything to do with technology limitations. Before I try and explain this, please understand that I am not a programmer, and I'm just regurgitating information that was given to me by others. This may not be entirely accurate, and I can't answer any technical questions about why this isn't possible.
First of all, we will probably never be able to flatten or reshape land in any manner (aside from what we can now do with camps). The terrain for all the planets, on all the servers, is pulled from a master database file of some kind, and this is compared against the location of your toon to determine what you see on your screen at any particular time. In order to allow permanent changes in terrain, each server would require it's own resources for this operation, and the game simply isn't set up that way. It's not a problem with camps, because the temporary nature of them keeps the required calculations to a minimum, but permanent changes would be very computer intensive and lag-inducing and as a result just won't be available. The devs stated at Fan Fest that deformable terrain is NOT on the agenda anywhere in the near future, and probably never (I'm guessing maybe in SWG2).
As far as streets go, we may have a little more hope there, but not anytime soon. There was talk that swapping textures on certain squares might be possible, but even that isn't on anyone's development radar at the moment. I think the best we can hope for in the short term is for all the collidable flora to be removed within city limits so there are no clipping issues on steps and such. Walls and bridges might make an appearance too, but don't hold your breath with the combat upgrade in the works and a promised Smuggler revamp after that. We might get some kind of terrain bone thrown to us by June or July.
Sorry to throw a damper on the thread. The ideas are all good ones, but like many other good ideas about this game, they've been presented and shot down already.
The difficult part comes with wether or not the players computer consults the server about the shape of the terrain. If the computer consults the server for terrain info, then no problems. However if the computer doesn't then this will mean pretty regular mapping updates on login or passing through new cities.
I've played many 3D action games and I remember when they were saying that deformable terrain was impossible in Unreal Tournament. Just because it wasn't built into the software to begin with, doesn't mean it can't be done. The devs might want to look at finding some developers that are familiar with coding deformable terrain in 3d games.
The difficult part comes with wether or not the players computer consults the server about the shape of the terrain. If the computer consults the server for terrain info, then no problems. However if the computer doesn't then this will mean pretty regular mapping updates on login or passing through new cities.
I've played many 3D action games and I remember when they were saying that deformable terrain was impossible in Unreal Tournament. Just because it wasn't built into the software to begin with, doesn't mean it can't be done. The devs might want to look at finding some developers that are familiar with coding deformable terrain in 3d games.