I'm putting this idea in the common thread, slightly offtopic in regards to current discussion twist. If it would do better in separate thread, so be it.
The primary design objective is to allow to reuse a road, allow people use existing roads as a part of their own roads without affecting earlier users. The secondary design objective is to enable roads to affect landscape.
Implementation:
- allow initiating fast travel from any milestone (requested multiple times)
- remove the concept of road ownership (by owners of either end)
- instead introduce a milestone claim, which is recharged by 1 point by each incoming travel and by another point by each ougoing travel, double that for a crossroads, there is no explicit claim owner,
- a milestone (or crossroads) would lose 1 point of auth daily and hold 30 days worth of auth
- anyone can upgrade a milestone to crossroads; a wooden crossroad sign can hold 3 directions, a stone crossroad sign can hold 8 directions; directions are defined as N, NW, W, SW, S, SE, E, NE plus optional label it would not be possible to link two roads in the same octant, but if a direction slot is occupied one can link at the milestone occupying the slot
- upgrading or linking to an existing crossroads is not considered vandalism but removing a link is, as destroying a sign is
- allow naming of crossroads and milestones; a default name for a milestone is <crossroads - <dir> - ##> where crossroads is the name of crossroads it has been extended from, dir is direction on initial crossroads and ## is a milestone number; only crossroads can be renamed when upgrading from a milestone.
- a road can be named but it is optional, can be done when connecting first milestone (as it is now) or via vandalism,
- a direction on a milestone is named after crossroads at the far end if one exists, it shall be filled-in when the chain of signs is terminated by crossroads,
- enable random stomping unpaved terrain to dirt at every use of the road akin to decay hit (suggested before), plus a tile or two behind milestone hot spot to avoid ugly unstomped patches (works like rounded line ends in any painting program)
- enable random vine removal by the same decay hit - important for keeping paved roads in good shape
- enable turning stomped ground to default paving if road auth is fully charged (that is auth of both neighbouring milestones) - this one is really disputable, I am ok with letting players do the paving
- introduce memorizing itineraries, similar to memorizing charterstones, limited base number of memorized itineraries for a new char, more capacity with skills and credos
- introduce written itineraries, that can be made from a memorized one and can be both used to memorize and to follow
- itineraries will became obsolete as road network is modified, memorized itineraries should use server-side object id's so they keep working until the road is broken, written itineraries should use crossroads names so they can be trolled by renaming crossroads and can be also readable as a text so one can just follow it as a guide.
- itineraries can be used on a crossroads to follow them
- itineraries can be memorized by following them if there is free memory slot
- an empty parchment can be used on crossroads dialog box to start writing an itinerary and then on every subsequent crossroads to add it to the list, in this manner it can be done inconsistent, screw the user,
- an empty parchment can be used on memorized crossroads list to write itinerary at once, it should be as correct as memorized itinerary is
- crossroads can be memorized as a starting, middle or ending waypoint along with direction one needs to take to go further, directions on a milestone can be memorized too but it is useful only if one intends to start or end travel in the middle of nowhere,
- optionally a dialog box when initiating a travel to define at which milestone to stop
- optionally underground biome tiles should be stomped too
- optionally higher daily drain for stone roadsigns/crossroads and lower for wooden ones, while having much larger capacity on stone signs.
- optionally introduce travel weariness for fast travel (suggested before), possibly less if the road section is paved - it would add to server load, but it can be pre-calculated for unloaded map tiles
The expected effect is that existing roads will be reused and kept maintained by players using them. Roads can be griefed by blocking them or vandalizing signs as it functions now. Additionally a milestone sign can be killed without leaving scents by walling it off and forcing people to walk around. Some additional griefing can be done by inserting crossroads named identically as crossroads further downstream so people using written itineraries are directed wrong way.
A crossroads sign would look like:
Aurora
East Sovhoz Sunny <follow> <travel> <remove> <memorize/add>
West Red Wood Abbey <follow> <travel> <remove> <memorize/add>
Southeast House Reindeer <follow> <travel> <remove> <memorize/add>
<list of memorized itineraries starting from this particular sign>
A milestone related to second road on above example would look like:
Aurora - W - 45
East Aurora <follow> <travel> <remove> <memorize/add>
West Red Wood Abbey <follow> <travel> <remove> <memorize/add>
<list of memorized itineraries starting from this particular sign, if any>
An itinerary would look like:
From Aurora to Viddarrheim
Aurora: West
Red Wood Abbey: NorthEast
Another itinerary would look like:
From Aurora to <some questgiver>
Aurora West
Aurora - West - 34: NorthWest
A biased collection of arbitrarily cherrypicked quotes:
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=59271&p=757705&hilit=roads&sid=421c053f8cb3a8fc1abb22dff4a190ca#p757721A lot in common with this one:
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=59271&p=757705&hilit=roads&sid=421c053f8cb3a8fc1abb22dff4a190ca#p757722viewtopic.php?f=48&t=61143&p=778014&hilit=roads&sid=109117b15c8ddac89fe51a5709e6a582#p778313My own old post and a couple of following posts:
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=61287&hilit=roads&start=40#p781141