DD/Terrain/Island Concept
From Unknown Horizons
This page is part of the Unknown Horizons design document. Please discuss everything concerning this topic on the "discussion" tab of this page. If you´re not sure whether your ideas are fitting the Unknown Horizons style, either use the discussion page, talk to us, or edit the "Questions" section of this page, but please don´t directly edit the other parts.
Proposal
Summary
The world in Unknown Horizons first consists only of water tiles. These tiles populate the space within the map size and the space behind the edge to create the illusion of an endless sea.
This void is filled with Islands. Islands are static chunks of terrain, but can be placed in the world at run-time. Technically, the terrain is defined by a flat 2D-Array of tiles. In this context, terrain means all kinds of land and water, so an island can create special water tiles like fishing grounds.
The island is an important logical entity, since every building has associated exactly one island to it. Therefore a city can be defined as a set of buildings of the same player on the same island.
Open questions
| Open question: How are mountains implemented? If they should look high enough to cover tiles above them, they can't be simply tiles and need to be handled specially. dauerflucher |
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| Open question: How to specify resource deposits? Some buildings, like mines or fishing huts may need special terrain in their radius to work. To limit the amount of resources, these special terrain tiles should be associated to resources of limited amount. Some buildings simply won't work if their resource is missing (fishing huts), others may even not be built when there is no resource (mines). Resources should be variable at run-time to adjust the levels difficulty. dauerflucher |
Use Cases
- Script places island into world, blocking units have to be handled in some way.
- Island is removed from worls by script.
Phasing
General
The island concept is fundamental and has to appear in the first milestone.
