Where's my Friend? (A n00b's suggestion)

[pandesmos]

Hi All,

Brand new and loving every minute I've spent playing so far! As soon as my first character died to ants and a thorn in the foot, I knew I was hooked.

I think the noob experience is working fine at this time, and the addition of "intro to the game quests" will likely address many of the things I wasn't sure about originally (e.g., "The power of left click then right click", "Use the bucket on the cup, not the cup on the bucket").

That said, the addition of a togglable "Distance to Friend" number on the party arrow showing how many steps there are between your two characters (assuming you could walk to them in a straight line).

The main scenario this would assist with is:
*New Player "I'm heading your way!"
*3 hours and 15 rivers later "OMG where ARE you?", followed shortly by "OMG ANTS!". =D

It would also help ensure that I'm not robbing from neighbors, as players could set a "I don't steal w/in 10,000 steps" rule for their village, and other fun things like that.

-Pando

[loftar]

I can see why this would be good, indeed. However, I just recently removed globally visible coordinates from the game in order to prevent people from recording locations and tipping others off, since it was annoying when the locations of secret villages were being published in such ways. Adding distances to the party arrows would allow an easy workaround for coordinates being unusable, since knowledge of the distance along with the rather precise knowledge of the angle that the client already has would allow calculation of relative coordinates.

Maybe it would be acceptable if the distance was presented very inprecisely, such as a logarithm of the distance rounded to the nearest integer. That would probably still be usable enough for knowing how much longer it is to a friend, while preventing precise calculation of coordinates.

[Chakravanti]

You can still calculate relative coordinates....it's just a lot more of a pitfa.

[loftar]

You can still calculate relative coordinates....it's just a lot more of a pitfa.

You can? How?

[theTrav]

You can still calculate relative coordinates....it's just a lot more of a pitfa.

You can? How?

create some maps, pick a spot for your origin and a size in pixels for your unit of measure... Same way it's done in the real world?

[loftar]

Oh well, yes, if you were referring to that method, then it's fine. I think that that should, indeed, be possible. :)

[Chakravanti]

Yeah, it's a matter of tracking from known points of reference and calculating differentials in the given coordinates every time you log/teleport.

This method also works with old coordinates if you have a known point of reference to calculate from.

So, you can effectively derive coordinates of a location by walking to RoB from any given location and tracking differentials.