[Feature] More functional area locations list

Bugs & Features
16

I feel my input in this thread can be benefitial :sweat_smile:

I will mainly write why things work the way they do, and my thoughts behind their behavior. Can it be improved? YES! So, just because I had some intial thoughts, it doesn’t mean they are the best thoughts.

Mixing of location types

We currently have 2 location types: room & (sub)area
As location goes, the two share similar traits; they have a name, a map position, a population.

This has mainly been the reason for mixing them in the list.
But I admit GUI wise, their difference is far from obvious. I have multiple times gotten the question why some “rooms are white”. So, I am up for improving it!

Purpose of Area page

The area page was created for (roughly) the following purposes:

  1. Map giving a better sense of you being inside a world
  2. Map gives a sense of how where you are in relationship to other places.
  3. To encourage exploring as you can see places in the area
  4. Show population - to encourage visiting places to see “what is going on”

And that is mainly why the list is created in the way that it is, with the sorting to focus on the most populated places to make it easy to see where things are going on.

Sorting by nearby rooms

@Khat, your suggestions are mainly aimed towards improving point 3 - exploration.
Having the exits in the Room page does indeed work against the exploration aspect of the Area page. Some sort of exit usage would be nice.

Problem

  • No destination info available - Because how exits work, I currently don’t reveal the destination for exits through the API. One reason why exits doesn’t show their destination is because I don’t plan for it to always have one single destination. With the coming (in the future) of scripts, exits may or may not take you to the ‘default destination’ that you configure for the exit.
  • Non-area destinations - Exits may lead to rooms not in the area. Or to rooms that belongs to a subarea of the current area.
  • One way exists - Exits are one way. But this is a minor issue

Because of this (especially the first and last one), it is not as easy to map a location on the map that you click on, to an exit to use.

This can be mitigated with the idea of the exit linkage that I was talking about. By letting ‘links’ be their own entity that you can add to an area.

However, I would wish to find a way to avoid the “double work” of adding both exits and links in order to bridge the info-gap between rooms and locations.

Room short desc

Maybe we should have short desks for rooms too that you can see when hovering a location pin?
Hmm, or maybe short desc should be a Location property instead of area/room property…? Let me think about that

Seeing room desc while not in room

I prefer the idea that you have to be in a place to actually see its description. The same with characters descriptions. While being able to see a room without going there can be convenient, I’d rather want inconvenient exploration instead :slight_smile:
Kind of like why people use lead/follow instead of summon/join.

Optional character location visibility

From a technical point, the “mutual watchers” option is far from trivial to achieve, nor would I want it. Such a feature would start leak info about who is watching who, which is something I’d rather avoid:

“Hey! Why can’t I see your room, but mrX can see it? You are watching him but not me?!”

However, it would be possible to make a “Show character location for all” setting.

Did I miss something that you wish my feedback on?

1 Like