Lalo Martins wrote:
And so says Mark Wedel on 07/01/06 13:50...
Personally, I'm more inclined to think of the world as an infinite
plan. That allows infinite expansion, and gets rid of any odd issues
regarding world wrapping and compression you should really get.
But in that model, it then makes sense to have bands of temperature -
for example, at world_x_130 (far south) would be a band of
ice/cold/whatever, but if we had a world_x_180, it might be nice that
far down (starts to get warmer).
/me puts his fantasy writer hat
Ok, here is one neat proposal. Oddly enough, nothing I have ever seen
in-game mentions a sun.
So, the world is an infinite plan. 0,0 is an arbitrary point, probably
the further NW that the sailors of the Old Empire ever sailed.
Light/heat sources are a number of fixed points in the sky (or on the
top of high mountains even!). For reasons that the mages and priests
spend their lives debating, their light goes off once a day (for the
night), and it follows a cycle of strenghtening and weakening over a
longer period that became known as an year.
(The days have the same length on all known light sources. The seasons
could be different if we wanted, but that's probably unnecessary
complication on the weather code.)
So each continent has one or more "suns" independent of the others. The
reason we don't sail much between continents is that it's too cold, the
water freezes, and even magic won't work. Only extremely skilled
sailors with the help of extremely skilled mages can find the routes -
like the navy of the Old Empire.
(Oddly enough, spells of "teleportation" style work across these
distances, so word of recall, town portal, etc isn't affected - this
probably explains how the dragon hangars and Pupland transport work.)
/me takes off the writer hat
Codewise: any tile not mapped will be defaulted by the weather system to
a large sheet of ice, which blocks spells, damned.
Gamewise, we pick an arbitrary point of the existing continent.
Personally, I kind of like the idea of putting the "sun" on the top of a
high mountain, so somewhere to the northwest of the big range in the
middle of the continent would be best - most places keep more or less
the same climate, and even the Antarctic doesn't require moving.
As for "my" continent, I'll take a good look at it and decide where to
put the light source(s).
the other more 'traditional' belief is that it is the sun god who flies his
chariot across the land which is the sun. That is of course why the sun moves
accross the sky - at some point, he is just so far away, you can't see him anymore.
That was more what I was thinking. And this works fine - no reason you can't
have multiple sun gods (or maybe that one god has some helpers that travel the
different lines). Multiple gods is interesting - one oculd imagine different
gods one could worship in different areas - potential reason to start in other
areas also.
The oddity about doing single points of sun is that distance from that sun
should determine the weather as well as light. Thus, if we put it in the
middle of the existing continent, in practice, the center should be nice and
warm and sunny, and the coastal areas (given the continent is somewhat round)
should all be cold. I don't think that really works with the existing system.
This can be solved by having multiple suns sprinkled around the continent, but
this starts to get more complicated - especially as related to the weather,
because the weather code has to know where these are. And you'd basically get
the issues you have with lighting - dark (cold) areas wher the suns don't reach,
and hot areas where they overlap, etc. It'd seem to be a fairly odd setup to me.
The odd part about my plan is why you get seasons - I suppose one could state
that for some reason, certain times of year the gods flaming chariot isn't as
bright, this colder (and shorter days because it would disappear from sight sooner).
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