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| Time Compression and Fast Travel | |
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| Topic Started: Sep 7 2006, 12:19 PM (174 Views) | |
| Ilsamir Lord | Sep 7 2006, 12:19 PM Post #1 |
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Hi everyone, This is a question I've been considering for some time for the mod, and I thought I'd ask what few of you read these things to give me your views. Feel free to post your own comments on the matter too, here, to start you off, are my opinions: Advantages of Space/Time Compression 1. Reduces periods of time between events, thus keeping the pace strong. 2. In the case of large maps it considerably reduces periods of little or no plot development. 3. Reduces time spent travelling. 4. Increases the frequency of encounters with NPCs and enemies, thus more action. 5. General improvements to pace of gameplay/satisfaction of players resulting from the above. Disadvantages 1. May reduce immersion/realism by grouping geographical/other features too close together. 2. Day-night cycle may become irritating if not timed thoughtfully. 3. May require strange scaling of major landforms or locations to be coherent. 4. May require reduction in number of planned NPCs to fit in with scaling. 5. A suitable time/space compression may be difficult and time-consuming to ascertain and/or may not apply well enough to the circumstances. Advantages of “Fast-Travel” – Teleportation Style 1. Reduces or eliminates the tedium of travel. 2. Allows players to increase/decrease pace by using/not using the system. Disadvantages of “Fast-Travel” – Teleportation Style 1. May break immersion/pace if used too often. 2. Lack of realism due to “magical” element. Advantages of “Fast-Travel” – Realistic Style 1. Pace can be maintained as desired by the writer as fast-travel is only possible from certain points to certain points at certain times. 2. Realism is maintained by using immersive means, which are still optional. 3. Reduces tedium of travel when your goal is not an exciting one, or when your road is well known to you. Disadvantages of “Fast-Travel” – Realistic Style 1. “Realistic” methods may still feel tacked on. 2. Management of times/places of fast-travel methods by writer may irritate players. I realise a poll would have been better, but despite asking for a multiple choice poll it refused to give me one. Please, just air your views in a comment anyway  .
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| Master_Thief | Sep 8 2006, 09:24 PM Post #2 |
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I think fast travel should be kept, as it can help to give the game a good pace: something that Morrowind often lacked. However instead of having fast travel as it is, it would be quite cool to have boats and carts to transport people around. This could simply be the same as the ships in Morrowind where you just pay for the journey and your teelported there in a similar way to a door. But wouldn't it be great if you actually sit on the cart, or ships deck, as it travels. Completely impossible I know, but even still...a feature for the elder scrolls 5 maybe! I think that the day/night cycle in Oblivion is quite good as it is. This could be altered depending on the size of the map perhaps. Talking about the size of the map. It might be ok to have a massive map if there are large expanses of wilderness, such as rolling hills and open plains. They might be pretty sparsely populated with people and objects, but they would provide some added realism and some damn good views! |
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| Ilsamir Lord | Sep 8 2006, 09:57 PM Post #3 |
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Yeah, I think we agree, which is convenient
 . My only concern with having large areas of wilderness is that players who want to travel only by foot/horse (manually, if you will) will spend a hell of a lot of time travelling between locations. As you would assume this amount of time can be reduced based on the scaling. Oblivion does "time-compression" by compressing the world. The cities - like the Imperial City - are meant to be much larger. At the moment the outer cities - Chorrol etc. - are really just villages, with only twenty or thirty buildings, when in reality they might have about 100 or more. Essentially it works like this (just to reiterate what I'm sure you already knew): Full scale - full time taken. A 10 (24 hour) day journey (from the north to the south of the Western Continent for example) will literally take 240 hours. 1:2 scale - half that time, so 10 days is 120 hours (still longer than I've played Oblivion for in the several months I've owned it ).1:10 scale - 10 day journey remains quite long at 24 hours. One day = 2 hours (night + day) So we see that we will need to come up with a considerable compression rate in order to make the game playable for casual people, while maintaining a strong sense of the size of the world. Oblivion did this admirably, as I only occasionally felt that the world could be larger. Travel times were of a satisfying length. There was always a sense of achievement in walking between cities, for example. However, if fast travel is done in a convincing/realistic way (with horse carts, ships etc.), perhaps the world can be a larger scale than Cyrodiil, allowing players to go out into a vast wilderness if they wish to. A lot of this comes down to the story as well, which I'll go into later , I'm a little in a rush at the moment. Suffice it to say, for now, that I'm going to be trying to work out a time-compression which is based on actual travel speeds, and the distances covered in the story over given periods of time. These calculations will almost certainly affect my calculations in the "Scale" thread.
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| Master_Thief | Sep 9 2006, 05:13 PM Post #4 |
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I like the idea of having areas of wilderness which the player can choose to visit if they wish, and then having the main storyline based around much more compact areas. Perhaps initially the map could be relatively small (though still bigger than Oblivion), with the western continent being about 20km squared, and then create plugins that enlarge the world considerably. It would probably be best to focus on one landmass at a time and then add new areas later, similar to the Tribunal and Bloodmoon expansions for Morrowind. Of course it depends on the area of land covered by the main plot. One way of doing things might be to place fast travel modes of transport (carts, ships etc) along the course of the main quest in useful locations, but position them so that some manual travelling is encouraged. If done well this might balance the game and give it a good pace whilst maintaining a sense of freedom. |
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| Ilsamir Lord | Sep 10 2006, 09:16 PM Post #5 |
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Those sound like good ideas. I'll show you the map with the first leg of the journey marked out when I get a chance
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| Ilsamir Lord | Sep 21 2006, 11:04 PM Post #6 |
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Okay, sorry about the delay. Here's the map with the first half-day's journey marked out. The blue dot shows the starting point, the red lines the course and the green dot the end point.  Basically, Udeval leaves his house in the Morchanin settlement at noon then makes his way up the south-western wall, speaks to the guard who lets him through the gate, walks down the main avenue to the palace walls, talks to another guard and is allowed through the inner gate, walks through the garden and talks to another guard who lets him into the tower to speak with the king Ilahir X. The meeting is quite short, and Udeval leaves, stopping before the gate at the stables to get a horse. He then leaves the city and follows the road down to the river and over the bridge. He stops for the night on the outskirts of the forest at around 6pm. The world map will need to be changed somewhat to match the scale of Darineth with the rest of the map, but that shouldn't be too difficult. |
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| Master_Thief | Sep 23 2006, 09:16 PM Post #7 |
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Cool.
That should be quite useful. My only concern at the moment is that I dont know how to create a map to scale. To import terrain from geocontrol into TES CS, the size needs to be 1024x1024. Making a map bigger than this involves importing several of these land masses and sticking them together. I've found out how to do this and have split the western continent into sections to be drawn up in geocontrol. The problem is that I dont know how big a 1024x1024 landmass is supposed to be in real world units. I'll do my best to find out, however if possible it might be an idea to try and search for an experienced mapper. I kind of know what i'm doing but there are probably people out there who are experts at this, and i'm certainly not. The guy who created the WorldBuilding 101 tutorial on the TES CS wiki (http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/WorldBuilding_101) might be worth contacting. For the moment though i'll keep working on it as best I can.
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| Ilsamir Lord | Sep 26 2006, 05:43 AM Post #8 |
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Yeah, I'm always looking
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