Politician Archive

Does anyone use a particular method to plan thier city layout and if so what?

One thought might be to use the overhead facility placement screen as a way of mapping on a graph. As you move your structures around, you'll find that they click around as if on a grid. You could measure distances using the distance of each "click" on the placement screen as one grid square. Start out with your city hall at (0,0) and map away.

See my map here:

http://www.sylvergryphonbrotherhood.com/swg/sylverhold_map.html

I take a screenshot with the overhead map on zoomed out as far as possible, and then open up Paint Shop Pro (get it free at jasc.com). I carefully cut away any extra features and add the houses as a layer into my drawing. The trees, features, names, radii, etc. are all different layers of teh drawing. When I am done I save it as both a .psp file (to retain the layers) and as a .jpg file (for the web). I update the city map every couple weeks or so.

I looked for an area thatseemed ok and hoped for the best...set aside an area that looked ok for the civic structures, bases, etc. And it worked lol. Really, part of the fun is trying to work a desighn out of the terain, and not working a desighn for the terain IMO =p

There is a link to anExcel file in the boards here somewhere that uses the grafical feautures of Excel to create a city map with the grid of a table ...

I used PaintShopPro and inserted scaled pictures of the buildings I took in SWG from the building screen (the bird eyes view) ... ein 8x8m square is 20x20px so a medium haus is a 100x100px pic ... I have the auto-grid on and several layers ... one for all the buildings, one for the names, one for streets, one for the zones, and one or two for possible buildingplaces for the next citzens.

But as a Metropolis it's quite huge 2600x2600px with multiple layers

An older version looks like this: Our Map

No, it would be impossible since all the items would be deleted and that is extreme greifing that just won't get coded in. What they could/should do is let us drop homes without penalty for a time (I'd say a day) so we can drop everything in town and then /transfer it to the other guy in order to make the city form to your idea.

It would be nice if you could pull up a player's house, and have their house contents go into a "packing crate" which would work like a factory crate. I mean... in essence, items are just pointers on a database, right? So... wouldn't it make sense to be able to create a unique list of these pointers, so you could take them out one by one? That way, a mayor could remove a house at will, and the player who owned that house would recieve a packing crate with all the items and the deed for his house, with all the maintenance still on it.

At the very least, mayors should be given the ability to condemn a structure, which would mean you would be unable to add anymore maintenance to it, andthe ownerwould either have to redeed it, or let it delete itself due to natural causes.

Well if you would be able to just put things in "a storage crate" then they would have had that from inception or at least talked about it. As it is if you want to move the house to anywhere you have to remove every item, redeed, then redrop the house, then redrop each item from your inv, bank, and pack. Just getting it all back in the house (albeit in a cramped way) would ease this tremendously.

Keep dreaming.

Half my office is running around "correcting" noobs to the town .. even though I give specific instructions on where things go (and it's obvious if you use the Map View... "ctrl-M, you'll see what I'm getting at") .. and they don't.

Convenient? Yes. Practical? No.. even if you managed to have "a storage crate" .. who gets screamed at when a precious item ("Why yes, that stack of 3 Bristley Hide was irreplaceable...") poofs?

I think.... to make this system work... is to have a "static" strong box in your house. This box will hold all your items (that way you don't need hanging backpacks.

You can still hang backpack.. but if you move a house.. ALL items will go into the strong box that way when I move the house.. all items are stored in the strong box. If I lose my item, and I use bring item to strong box (as oppose to my location) this would be good.. since the strong box is "static" as in part of the house

this way if any items are "moved" it will automactically store in the strong box.