Bridges

[Laremere]

Oh, I was thinking you meant that having people farry people around with row boats.

Cable run farries would work well.

[Peter]

I was thinking that having the bridge be an internal cell or world or whatever the terminology is would be pretty awesome.
Then from the outside it would be a passable graphic (perhaps the term "walkable" is more appropriate, because we know that Jorb's art is always better than merely passable) of a nice arched, covered bridge, and inside it would be a simple floor arching up.

It would certainly give the illusion of working properly, though a major problem would be getting carts to pass through the doors- for most buildings that's obviously impossible, but the whole point of bridges would be a permanent way to cross rivers with carts. I don't think it's insurmountable to make carts cross bridges, though.

For balance reasons, such internal bridge areas may have to do decay and have darkness like an external area, but I'm not sure. I say this because otherwise we can be pretty sure that people will end up building them just for storage space.

More difficult than that would be that you'd need at least eight large art elements- a left and right facing bridge exterior and interior, and a short and long version of each for various sized rivers.

Alternatively, there could be six parts to each bridge: a leftward facing bridge beginning, middle, and end, and a rightward facing set. For long bridges, it could have two or three middle parts. Oh, and you'd need a way to design these bridges- though this is getting so complex they might as well implement the whole architecture thing, which I don't think is planned for some time if ever.

A whole separate problem is preventing bridge spam- there's no easy way to do this, since while you don't want more than one bridge crossing the same river on the same screen, you still want to have a bridge from one shore to an island and from that island to the other shore, even if the bridges are only a tile or two apart. Though I hate to say it, pathfinding may be the best solution here. It would simply check to see if it could find a way from one end of the bridge under construction to the other, including by pathing through other bridges nearby. If there is a way around that's less than a thousand tiles long or something, you can't place the bridge.

Combine that with having the bridge require some expensive skill to prevent really determined griefers from trying to crash the server with pathing spam, and there you go. Though even that isn't essential, since you can have the pather run with really low priority for ten or twenty seconds while the character is "surveying" or something.

[sabinati]

The problem is that only one tile exists in any one place. One possible solution would be to create two bridge pillars or something. A short range teleportert that only works accross a small distance of water, and can't have anything blocking them.

Farries are a nice idea, but unless you have two people actively managing it at all times, doesn't work.

built objects exist on top of the tiles.

[Laremere]

The engine simply doesn't support bridges as people would like to see them.

I like this idea:

Cable ferries work. You can just drag it to your side using the cable.

Also, it's not a matter of balancing bridges in gameplay, it's that the engine simply doesn't work in a way that allows bridges.

[Jackard]

Neither of these options allow for carts, but I honestly don't know of anyone who uses carts for traveling long distances.

:facepalm:

carts are half the point of bridges, now that we have boats.

ferries would only help if they could carry carts as well as people

[sabinati]

The engine simply doesn't support bridges as people would like to see them.

how so? seems to me like it could be done just fine. just because you don't know how to program something doesn't mean the guy that programs the game couldn't figure it out.

[Laremere]

I in fact do now how to program, that is why I see the problem. Loftorb can correct me if I'm mistaken, but the game works on a 2d grid, and two tiles can't exist at the same point on said point on the grid (such as having a bridge tile, and a water tile underneath.) in addition the engine doesn't have the support to have multiple layers of objects all moving around at the same 2d coordinates. It would take extreme hacking of the engine to get it so that players could walk on a surface that boats go under, and even more to make it so that players don't collide with boats under the bridge, while boats collide with boats, and players collide with players.

It's never a good thing to program something to work in a way that it is not intended to work, which is why the concept of bridges is so difficult, if not impossible without changing the way the engine works, to implement in a way people imagine seeing.

In addition, "just change the engine" is never something someone should suggest, unless they know exactly what they are talking about, because they can suggest something that seems logical in the real world, but is completely horribly illogical in the specific instance of code, if not within the entirety of programing itself.

[theTrav]

it's quite simple really, all jorloft has to do is model the bridge as an arch along the y axis and a plane along the x&z axis, and keep track of the height of boats and players and do a small correction to their collision detection code.

And of course get rid of this crazy "tile" notion, and instead just have mutable objects with width and height that are placed in an abstract coordinate space.

While they're at it it would also be good if they could model the movement and collisions based on mass and force, and perhaps have a per-item damage model involving separation of the object into smaller pieces on large collisions.

Also, rain and floods please.

And thinner atmospheres at higher altitudes

[sabinati]

or they could just make an object that can be walked on?

[Jfloyd]

I think it's silly that the idea of making it so that walking over the bridge teleports you across it, and going under it moves you under has been rejected.
Honestly I think that's the best solution. It's not like it's cheating or anything.