AC2 was RE: [MUD-Dev] Total Annilation of Downtime

[Dave Rickey]

From: "Marc Fielding" <fielding at computer.org>
> [Amanda Walker]

>> Oh, geez.  Not just fighting.  The scale is often wrong overall.
>> My first impression of DAOC was that I was playing miniature golf
>> or visiting Disneyland.  Don't get me wrong--gorgeous art, but
>> the terrain was way out of scale with the characters and
>> buildings.  EQ, AC & AC2 have less of the problem, though they
>> still suffer from the "short jog up to the top of the mountain"
>> problem.  AO is fairly reasonable.

> I've always been curious about this. Aren't scales (X units per
> "foot") locked down early in development? It's not just
> MMOGs. Many other games seem to have this issue to some extent. Is
> it a result of poor communication between level builders and
> characters modelers? Poor specifications? Varying builder/modeler
> skillsets?

Unless you want to make travel speeds highly insane (even more so
than AC1's "running" at 90 miles per hour), a world with
realistically scaled terrain is simply too big.  There wasn't any
absolute reason to limit "mountains" to a few hundred feet high,
except that making them a few thousand feet high would have required
an increase in world scale by a *large* factor.  In SWG, the setting
allows motorized and flying vehicles, and larger regions with more
spread-out features are more feasible.

Maybe someday we can do a Camelot expansion with ridable airborne
mounts, and have realistic terrain scales.

--Dave


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