Speed up travel time

[madfish]

I have just counted twice as many locations in Cantr than there are characters and I'm fairly sure I haven't seen half of them yet. Am I wrong when I say that the Cantr world is far too big?

I know this may be controversial but speeding up travel times would do wonders in my opinion. Firstly the world would naturally become smaller. Trade would increase. Relationships between towns would grow. And it would make everything seem a whole lot more active.

I would suggest that the longest distance between two locations in Cantr, wherever that is, should be reachable by base speed 1 vehicles on an express way within one turn. But keep sailing the same. Sailing is much slower irl than land travel so why shouldn't it be the same in Cantr? That would keep exotic islands exotic and import trade valuable.

I'm struggling to think of any downsides to this.

What about if you just trial it and see how it goes for a while? Surely, as far as coding goes, it would only require the road type multipliers to be adjusted?

[RedQueen.exe]

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes!

I've been arguing this on one occasion or another with some of the other RD guys already.

The fact of the matter is traveling is the most awful tortuous activity there is in cantr, and if you don't have a vehicles and have crappy town leaders that don't give you jobs, it is mind numbingly aggravating and I would argue makes you want to quit the game. There is nothing fun about having to spend days and days and days on the road with no interaction at all or even the ability to work on anything because you have no access to vehicles, jobs, or traders. This is why we have so many townies that just hang around and have mud fights until things come TO THEM.

Of course, the one concern I have is it could make vehicles slightly less attractive if you're already getting between towns within one or two travel ticks anyway.

Maybe if we had another option to automatically drive to a destination more than one town away where the char would drive straight there without stopping between towns... there would be a couple kinks to work out, like making sure you only can pick a route including towns you've been to so characters can't use it to see locations they shouldn't know about. But that should be a solvable problem, not to mention, the prevalence of maps now makes it a low risk to begin with.

[madfish]

Well I think you are thinking a bit faster than me. Base speed 1, according to the wiki, is the fastest speed for land vehicles. And I think the travelling route idea would make this ten times harder to implement for the programmers. But I still think things could be speeded up a hell of a lot before vehicles become unattractive.

I do agree, and I think this is a major problem, that a lot of travelling doesn't take place simply because of the time involved. This is preventing a lot of interesting roleplay from happening.

edit: I also think i use the word think too much.

[madfish]

Or, another idea, increase the amount of ticks in a day for land travel. That way you could make walking fast yet still make vehicles faster.

[RedQueen.exe]

I use the word too much as well, because I'm overly cautious about showing that I'm openminded and don't want to sound sure of myself.

I had misread and thought you meant across the board, though I would agree that sailing isn't as much of an issue. I'm primarily concerned with increasing walking times, because just going one town over means that character effectively doesn't exist for a least a few days. More than one town? Ugh.

[Doug R.]

I think there's a very real danger in making many vehicles obsolete. The only advantage will be in storage, and what difference does that make if you can just go back and forth three times in one day? I'm cool with scaling everything up some, but making most towns reachable in one tick? May as well teleport.

[EchoMan]

...though I would agree that sailing isn't as much of an issue.

You mustnot have tried to circumvent the world in a fully loaded sloop.

I have a char with that project currently.

[madfish]

What about if you did away with ticks for land travel completely and gave vehicles and walking a pph(pixel per hour) speed?

For example: Your sports car travels at 36pph you have 10 pixels to travel. You get there in 10 cantr minutes.

[RedQueen.exe]

He's talking about scaling to the point that any expressway is traversable in one tick only by the fastest vehicles available. He was very specific, and this does include room for slow vehicles and worse roads to take longer.

I'm still not as concerned about vehicles though, they're pretty tolerable as-is. What isn't tolerable are walking speeds, and I only think vehicle adjustments are really important in the case we need to keep vehicles from becoming obsolete.

Either that, or figure out a way to make it easier for characters to earn a bike. This is why so many newspawns turn to looting, the goal is to find an abandoned vehicle and then take it, so that you can actually enjoy the rest of the life of that character and not be locked away from interaction for days on end on the roadways.

[madfish]

I am mostly concerned about walking too. I'm just trying to work it without making vehicles obsolete.

I think this idea...

What about if you did away with ticks for land travel completely and gave vehicles and walking a pph(pixel per hour) speed?

For example: Your sports car travels at 36pph you have 10 pixels to travel. You get there in 10 cantr minutes.

or just simply trebling/quadrupling the amount of land travel ticks in a day, would make walking more tolerable and still keep vehicles worthwhile.

[Doug R.]

He's talking about scaling to the point that any expressway is traversable in one tick only by the fastest vehicles available. He was very specific, and this does include room for slow vehicles and worse roads to take longer.

Ok, fair enough.

What about if you did away with ticks for land travel completely and gave vehicles and walking a pph(pixel per hour) speed?

The game would have to support real-time processing, which, I assume, it would need to be rebuilt from the ground up to do.

or just simply trebling/quadrupling the amount of land travel ticks in a day, would make walking more tolerable and still keep vehicles worthwhile.

I don't like adding processing. The more things processing concurrently, the slower the game gets, and since Jos broke up the animal process, that already takes a half hour to finish. I'd say I'd be fine with setting the maximum speed on the best road to be one tick and scaling everything accordingly, but I'd have to see how it would actually affect everything before I signed on (i.e., someone would have to do it on paper first and post the results).

[madfish]

What about if you did away with ticks for land travel completely and gave vehicles and walking a pph(pixel per hour) speed?

The game would have to support real-time processing, which, I assume, it would need to be rebuilt from the ground up to do.

You could just call an event every cantr minute. something like

Code: Select all

$speed = 30; //in pixels per minute, after load and road typereductions
$time = 1; //1 cantr minute
$distance = $speed*$time;

function landTravel($distance); //or whatever function is called for updating travel. called every cantr minute


[SumBum]

How would this affect smaller islands? Not arguing against the suggestion, just pointing out other things to consider. If I remember correctly other language zones don't have as great of a spread between towns like the english zone.

[Doug R.]

What about if you did away with ticks for land travel completely and gave vehicles and walking a pph(pixel per hour) speed?

The game would have to support real-time processing, which, I assume, it would need to be rebuilt from the ground up to do.

You could just call an event every cantr minute. something like

Code: Select all

$speed = 30; //in pixels per minute, after load and road typereductions
$time = 1; //1 cantr minute
$distance = $speed*$time;

function landTravel($distance); //or whatever function is called for updating travel. called every cantr minute


I'm pretty sure the process itself takes longer than a minute to run. You're just asking to clog the server.

[madfish]

The more I hear about the backend of this game the more I think it should be rebuilt from the ground up.