Should NM get an Overland world?

[Gatz]

I've been poking around Samson's Overland snippet, and seen it in action on some MUDs, and I find it really cool. It basically adds an over world to a game. So, think RPGs where you see towns on a map, then you enter them, and that is how the overland works. It is awesome because it lets us have a vast world, without requiring builders to manually create each piece of random forest or terrain. They can focus on making the more interesting pieces like dungeons, towns, etc. It could plug in rather nicely to NM, as well.

I think it'd be pretty cool to add. Anyone have any thoughts on this? It'd be a rather painful undertaking to do, but it could potentially be worth it.

[Kaizan]

I think its a great idea. The concept of moving room by room like a stock ROM MUD to travel to a different area without any real hint of where you are in terms of the bigger picture is not exactly...pleasant. Having an overland map would be a great addition.

[Gatz]

Just to clear up some potential confusion. The overland world would be something that isn't an overhead map for areas, we already have that and you can use the map command or config +automap to auto display it. This would be something like say, old school RPGs how they had towns you could enter, but on the map they appear smaller and you walk around a big overworld.

A really quick and dirty example would be you'd be tooling around like normal and see an exit outside of a town and instead of the normal stuff, you'd be greeting with a ASCII map of a partial view of the world, showing where you are and types of terrain etc around you.

My really, really poorly down render of what a potential map could be:

ooooooooooooooooooooooooo
0000000000000000000^^^^^^^000
~~~~00000000000^^^^^^^^^^^^00
~~00#X0000000^^^^^^^^^^^^0000
~0000000000000000000000000000

And of course it'd have nice colors and a legend so you could make sense out of it. Basically, it'd be laid out like our current auto-mapper, but no room descriptions or specific room titles. It'd make it so we'd focus more on 'special places' and not burning time making a road or forest that is just mean to be a connector to another zone.

[Yamashita]

I'm a bit on the fence with this one, considering we've seen some scenes in Naruto where they're just walking through a forest on an escort mission and others where they're just running through a forest in the trees without paying any attention to the world around them.
I think that it might be a good idea if this goes in, to have builder-settable areas with random encounters with a given set of mobs/groups of mobs to spice things up while traveling the overworld. Also, having the ability to force a player into an "underworld" area with individual rooms on a given tile of the overworld instead of giving the option solely to the player.
I may eventually have more to say on the subject, but this was all I could think of for now.

[Gatz]

Hrm, I guess my main thrust with this was that I felt it would be nice to connect areas with the over world, rather than having builders have to make tons of 'connector' areas. I don't think it'd be good to try to use this as a substitute for constructed areas, but rather in addition to so builders could focus on the meat of a zone and not the fluff.

I think that is what you were getting at Yama, correct me if I'm wrong.

[Yamashita]

Yeah, that's pretty much it, but with the added bit of not making it just a transportation layer. It could be something to work up to, though. I generally agree that it takes too much effort for the builders to make roads and forests that are merely there for the purpose of transportation and this could easily solve that.
Also, I've thought of something else. It would be interesting to have multiple entrances/exits to a town/area depending upon which side you entered from in the overworld, e.g. a town could be accessed from the north and south via different vnums that tied to the overworld on opposite ends of the area.

[Matsu]

To be honest gatz i've spent many nights wondering how you live with yourself without an overland. I know of several muds that have Zoned areas in their ovreland so it wouldn't be preposterous for you to tailer each zone to have special encounters.. what might be simpler though would be to have "Camps" and "Dens" set up so that npcs would spawn from there and then area allowed to roam the overland freely.. of course distance from home should also make them more likely to vanish or weaker. As part of the naruto mythos is about tactics.. supply chains for enemies would get thin quickly