Politician Archive
Thread: Terraforming
Well actually the idea of terraforming could potentially come with paved tile. I don't know how the tiling will be implemented however I don't see how hard it would be to attach the powers of a camp with them. When you drop a camp on the top of a hill a ledge pops out to make enough area flat, well why not just do that with each tile? Drop enough of them next to each other and you have a nice looking street and potentially that little ditch is filled in.
Teraforming would be REALLY NICE but then where's the chalange in finding a location and planing a city. Zoning and future development. Granted I run a very large city so things like that are about the only enjoyment I see.
The think that pi$$es me off are these trenches that are made by rocks. They wear me out to no end. Then on top of that, when you think you have it right...the little F00ker moves on you....W T F^
Oh well. Wishfull thinking. I remmber a while back one of the coders for the Dynamic terain engine said it wouldnt be possible. So unless they change their minds /corsses fingers....I dont think we'll see it.
That's the thing though, camps do it all the time so couldn't they code something to do the same inside a city? Like I said tile might work or anything else, hell even make it so we can't build on top of the tile that way it is solely for looks and not exploiting the terrain. I just have a few ledges that work as streets (as opposed to walking up and down a massive crevasse) but they are about an inch thick at the top. Dropping a tile and making it look like a 1 lane street would make them look just so much better.
AgentClark wrote:
Oh well. Wishfull thinking. I remmber a while back one of the coders for the Dynamic terain engine said it wouldnt be possible. So unless they change their minds /corsses fingers....I dont think we'll see it.
I just don't think it fair that game cities can have flat terrain but huge player cities and metropolis' can't.
My guild did choose a rough piece of terran. And we can fit 100+ smalls in it easyily. Maybe even more. But I want to "design" my city not just make it fit.
I personally wish wen you place a city a 450m radius of land is flattended to show the limit of the city. Then for like 100k a week you can add a wall with gates.
And then when a house is being placed in a "city" then you can turn it 45 degrees at a time not 90.. so we can get some really nice looking player cities out there.
Other then holo-grind-athon and the new "Master Grinder" profession. There is not much else to do once you master your character to were you want him.
City designing is the last thing keeping ME in the game... if I can't make cool cities.. then what is the point.
Right now i'm working with what i got.. I'm just asking for a bit more help to make "city planner" something fun.
Not to throw punches but people who say it is fun building on the terrain.. how much time did you really put into building your city? Try making a really planned and layed out city.. with urban centers.. market centers and paths and stuff. It takes ALOT of time and effort OUTSIDE of the game as well as in to get the cities to look just right.
I do believer there should be limits.. Mount Tusken should not have a city up at the very to and distort everything.. maybe if the terrain became.. "ALL BUILDABLE" and not neccissarily completely flat that would work for me. As long as I can place anywhere in the 450m radius.. i'm a happy go lucky kinda guy. LOL
If easying the houses even more will accomplish that same effect.. then i'm all for it. I know there is like 3 stories of ramps below those houses.. LOL lets use em. They make the cities look fabolous the higher up the houses are on stilts.
Peace.
Xsi
I know how much time goes into planning and building a city (as well as the very expensive costs!). Here was my layout:
<a href="http://kory.spproductions.com/CityLayout.gif">City Layout</a>
Currently only half of the buildings are able to be placed... And those of us who are just starting our cities can't choose a good peice of land as they are all taken =p I used <a href="http://swgplanner.tyger.org">this tool</a> to plan my city, which I have made adjustments to more than once =p Thought I'd throw out the idea, seems some agree and some dont.
I was thinking..... since we can't terraform.. what about "plots" of space.. or box of land we can "pre-foundation"
this will fall under "zoning" really.. a mayor can "pre-place" blocks of foundation for.. housing... factory.. etc etc.. or even generic size... thus.. you just place what you are allow...
thus I can put a 5x5 block. and designate houses only... or houses/factory... or harvestor only.. or garden only.. civic only etc etc.. 
sure we can even go into more details like I can place shuttleport here only, or merchant tent only.. that way anyone who have zoning rights can place within those blocks make life WAY easier.. and we can block things.. and have a cost like 1k per 1x1 block per week... good sink.. but also make life WAY easier to plan things.
Texture changes would be welcome. But correct me if I'm wrong...
All terrain is equivalent across all servers. But each server maintains it’s own copy of the terrain model. There aren’t 30-odd servers going back to some master terrain server to figure out what to draw. So Lowca’s Corellia has –2368,3472 flattened and Corbantis’s doesn’t… who cares? I don’t see how permanent terrain modifications inside city limits is bad.
Laeren wrote:
Actually, servers should load from a Master Terrain Model. I don't know how often they do this, but this is just good programming sense, since they may need to alter the terrain across all galaxies to accomodate new POIs and the like. So, we can assume they all load from a single copy of the terrain, at whatever interval (it might even be every serverreboot, since everything hard-coded is the same across all galaxies).
We were told by Andy Somers, lead programmer for SWG, that flattening the terrain was intensive on the terrain engine for this reason, and therefore would never happen. Later in the day, they explained how the terrain in SWG is generated, and how the planets came to be the way they are today (artists had to go in and permanently terraform various places so they could place the NPC cities, etc etc.). They also talked about how the NPC cities were special becuase they are included in the "base load" for the servers (which also includes the terrain for every planet). This is why entire NPC cities load all at once (and stay loaded), player cities load a building at a time (and disappear after a while).
Now, given this model for how terrain is generated, can you see how intensive it would be on the terrain engine if each city were allowed to have altered terrain across all of the galaxies? First the servers load from the Master Terrain model (all of the things that are "set in stone"). Then each galaxy would have to load the 100s of altered terrain models based on each player city. Also, each server has to, whenever a character runs through that area, first calculate and then alter the terrain, every time a player runs through an area with altered terrain. Considering how often this would happen on a daily basis, that's millions more calculations added to the server, per second that some PC is running through an altered area. Since terrain is only generated 8m out from a character in every direction, it would have to reperform the alteration calculations first by comparing it to the Master Terrain model and then altering it based on that particular location's altered terrain setting (in a player city) every 8m that a player character runs, every second that they are anywhere inside of an altered terrain spot. Yuck.