Random(ish) thoughts
Ok.. here's where I get to do even more rambling than the other pages (which have quite enough rambling in already). From my (virtual) soapbox I'm going to say a little about a way in which the program could be developed, but not how I'm going to develop it.
As mentioned elsewhere within these pages (link after link after link) I have a very mothering attitude towards my programs, I hate releasing them into the wild. I always add more and more, just when it's nearly finished I try to put a new thing in, they're never quite ready for the big wide world. But I have to find a time when I've got to let go...sniff
With this in mind I try to equip a young fledgling program with enough to make it's own way. Hopefully the program won't crash, the interface should be simple enough to use, and then there's the user guide to help out. The Visual Basic source code is in there for touchy feely people.
So things I want to say...
The objects/items/monsters etc are placed on the nodes, so the number per world is limited by the number of tiles rather than the size of the world. A really big world should have more objects etc. than a small world, but this isn't how it works :( boo.
In reality you should be able to place an object anywhere, but to do this you'd need to calculate the height of any point on a plane. This I assume is a simple thing to do, but I don't have the time to really look into it.
a--d---b
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e-x /
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c
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Off the top of my head...
Point x is an object placed on the plane abc. We know the co-ords of the points a,b,c & x, and therefor the co-ords of point e. Thus we can work out the angle ecx (from the distances ce & ex). Once that angle is worked out, it can be used to find the distance ad, ad=ac*Tan(acx). The height of d is now easy to calculate (as we know the heights of a&b and the length along ab of d).
The distance of cx can be worked out using; cx=ce/Cos(ecx). Now height x can be calculated as heights c&d is know, as is the distance of x along the line cd.
I'm sure there must be really simple way of doing this but I'm no Geomancer, I have a methodical and untrained approach to these things... the chances are the above has about 2 or 3 things wrong with it.. if not the whole concept... such is life.
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Of course you'd need some interface to allow the user to click on any point on the map, and I've not make the interface easy to change. This is a problem with my baby, the code is there to poke around with and change, but the addition to the interface is tough, it's sort of "hardwired".
See look I told you I had difficulty letting go...
So please give my baby a good home and take care of it. If you've got a small amount of pleasure out of using it, it makes me more than happy. As I've noted, it really has very little practical purpose, so chances are you won't keep it around for to long, but I hope you enjoy the precious time you do spend together.
If you have any comments about the program good or bad (although I don't really have the time to act on any of them) please drop me a line at the e-mail address shown below.
I thank you...
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email modesty@io.com
URL http://www.genetics.gla.ac.uk/~modesty