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[manikus]

i'm thinking about setting a design in the real world, at least geographically speaking. however, very few cities are laid out in a nice square grid pattern that has roads running north/south and east/west.

my concern is then, how important is exact representation versus 'getting in the important stuff'? i'm talking about the dungeon, and not an actual map.

i'm having some issues with scale, if the road is a minimum of one square wide, then the blocks are about ten to twelve blocks wide. to do justice to even a small town would take a map dozens to hundreds of times larger than the largest size available in dungeon craft, or quite frankly, much more than i am willing to do.
currently, roads are one square wide, and the smallest block on the map is one square wide, with the other blocks being put into proportion with that.



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manikus
www.geocities.com/manikus5/dc/index.html

[dominions]

I'm currently doing the same thing (designing a town). What you need to do is a representation of a town, i.e. put in things like shops, inns, taverns, etc.. Put these places on winding streets, which gives the impression that the place is bigger than it actually is.
If you really wanted have a large town that's bigger than the 100x100 square level limit, you could say that the town is split by a river: Put one half the town on one level and the other on another. and where the bridge is supposed to be (at the edge of the map) put a Transfer Module Event (or something similar).
Hope that makes sense.


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[This message has been edited by dominions (edited 09-18-2001).]

[manikus]

these are good suggestions. but, i was thinking of a large city like san francisco. it's not necessarily important to me to put in every single address, but i would like to give the feel of san francisco, like you're walking on the very streets of san francisco...

any ideas?



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manikus
www.geocities.com/manikus5/dc/index.html

[Sir Jerome De Rouen]

What I would do is pick only the important buildings/locations you wanted and put them geographically where you want them, fill the space around them with the less important but filler style buildings. Join them with the more well known of street names.

Remember some of us dont have a clue what San Francisco should be like, Im from Brisbane Australia.

You could look at maps from the original gold box games, they gave a resonable representation (??) of cities and towns people may have visited in pen and papper games. Compare the game map with the pen and paper map and you will often notice certain "important" buildings in the same areas on both.

Obviously you are not going to be able to make an exact representation, but as long as you get the right feel I dont think anyone will mind.

I love the idea of using two maps with a river between them, I will use that one day for sure. but not just one bridge, several bridges at diferent points along the river would be great too.

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The Cauldron - http://members.optusnet.com.au/~jeremy77/index.html

[SilentThief]

I tried to do large city reporesentations in FRUA, and with DC you could do what I did which was to set up transfer "zones" as in like encounter zones, you step to the far edge of the grid map and it does an automatic transfer to the next and vice versa. the only problem with that in FRUA was that you might have a city (example of) 50 x 50 sq. and the next section is also 50 x 50 sq, but the transfer point (where you appear at) is only one (or up to 8 squares counting all 8 transfer points). Now, using a quest variable for your transfer point in the zone would work also, but the limits of FRUA made it so I didn't want to "burn" a bunch of events just for a more accurate transfer. What I finally settled for myself with larger city maps was having buildings that ran between the maps. These of course were unaccessable, but I never liked limiting players....

Hope this might give you some ideas as to how to overcome the problem.
SilentThief

[dominions]

Sounds interesting SilentThief.
As for the buildings not being accessible, I get round this by having a 'miscellaneous level' that contains all buildings & small dwellings that I don't have room for on the level they came from. Just set the mapping off for the level or put them sufficiently spaced apart that automapping won't show the other buildings.


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