Just a Quggestion!

[N-Aldwitch]

...which is a mix of Question and Suggestion.

Is weather in relation to the use of clothes, on the way?
As in, do we have possible future weather being programmed? Like, the southern islands are all snowy with the northern ones being similar, or at least mini-climates like an island's north and south being snowy, the center being dry (like it is in many continents with dry desert middles) and snow-capped top mountains and rainy Akypor's and Kwor's and other harbours?

[west]

...which is a mix of Question and Suggestion.

Is weather in relation to the use of clothes, on the way?
As in, do we have possible future weather being programmed? Like, the southern islands are all snowy with the northern ones being similar, or at least mini-climates like an island's north and south being snowy, the center being dry (like it is in many continents with dry desert middles) and snow-capped top mountains and rainy Akypor's and Kwor's and other harbours?

Please note that "northern" doesn't = cold and "southern" hot to anyone except those on the Northern Hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere, obviously, it's reversed.

And on cantr, which is torus-shaped, I have no idea what that'd mean. Would it mean that there are two equators, one on the outer surface of the ring and one on the inner?

Oh, and it has been proved to be torus-shaped as someone has sailed around the world north-to-south.

[kinvoya]

You can sail around the world north to south on a sphere, too, right? I never understood this torus thing.

[Chris Johnson]

Weather and climate is an already accepted suggestion and is actively being researched - though of low priority (primarily because of the complexity of designing a full blown climate simualtion)

Clothes will have some practical use when weather is implemented

This has been moved to rejected suggestions as a duplicate

[N-Aldwitch]

Okay thanks.

[dryn]

You can sail around the world north to south on a sphere, too, right? I never understood this torus thing.

You are right. The difference is that if several people were to start at various points on the earth, then head directly north, they would get closer together.

[west]

see my rather-lengthy reply to this at: http://www.cantr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11771

[Razorlance]

You can sail around the world north to south on a sphere, too, right? I never understood this torus thing.

In simple terms Cantr is a square, or possibly rectangular, map which is curved around into a tube, then that tube curved around until both ends meet each other, then hey presto, a torus. This means you can sail in any direction and eventually arrive back where you started, unless you hit land. And as West says, you'll never cross paths with anyone else on a parallel course.

See link for definition of a torus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torus

[wichita]

Can we convert the map to a sphere and switch to polar coordinates? That would be spiffy.

[Razorlance]

Can we convert the map to a sphere and switch to polar coordinates? That would be spiffy.

That would be pretty shiny, though I think that only a handful of other games over the years have ever implemented a true sphere as a map suggests it might be a tad difficult. Though Jos or Chris like a challenge, don't they?

Or we could do Civ IV style, with a band of land around the circumference of a sphere and large north and south continents which are unuseable, i.e. an invisible wall, but that's really a step back from what we have now.

[Sho]

It would be very possible to make and display a truly spherical map - the visible area is much smaller than the full sphere, so the distortion would be insignificant. Controlling a ship and giving lighthouse headings would be harder to do consistently.

How I would build the Cantr map system on a sphere:
The map is stored as a vector graphic, with locations given by polar coordinates.
The map displayed on the character screen is a gnomonic projection, with "up" being north if the character is on land, and the direction of travel if at sea.
Ships would sail in great circles. Direction changes would be given relative to the current heading: "turn 17 degrees," for example. Lighthouse headings would also be given relative to the direction of travel. A compass heading, giving direction relative to north, would be visible but would not be used directly for ship control.

This is not practical because:
A good deal of Cantr would have to be rebuilt from the ground up, to say nothing of the work that would have to go into transforming the current "flat" Cantr world into a curved sphere without changing regional power balances.
Map graphics would be significantly more server-intensive to generate. Distances would also become nontrivial to compute.
Explorers would probably find this more difficult to deal with. Mapmakers would be utterly screwed.

[wichita]

gnomonic projection...

[tiddy ogg]

Note that unless you have correctly guessed the orientation of this torus, you will spiral around for years before coming back to your starting point.
It seems from the above that going to one of the cardinal points works, but if you went at 10 degrees, you'd be at it almost for ever.
Flatten the torus back out to a flat square. When you reach an edge and fall off, you'll reappear on the opposite side at the same latitude/longitude.