[crossfire] Re: New movement code.

[Mark Wedel]

  Rivers are a messy case.  Blocking swimming and flying over them doesn't make 
a lot of sense if you can fly over lots of other stuff.

  While they are often used to protect areas, I'd make the case that in most of 
the bigworld map, allowing people to fly/swim over them wouldn't be that big a 
deal - sure, there is a bridge down a ways, but letting someone fly over 
upstream shouldn't be a problem.

  After all, it then makes zero sense that if I follow a river down to the sea, 
I can swim or fly over the shallow water to get around the river, but not over 
the river itself.

  That said, there are certainly a few places where it really needs to block 
movement.  The problem is that in many of those, it can look artificial (look, a 
nice ring of river).

  As a note, and this includes ethereal travel, any changes to the blocking of 
spaces has to be done on a map by map/space by space basis.  IF we change the 
archetypes to suddenly allow swimming and flying over shallow water, I think 
we'll find many maps just got broken.  Same for ethereal travel through walls.

  That said, I could certainly see someone writing scripts (or updating the java 
editor) with something like 'allow ethereal travel on walls on this map' or 
something, so that its just a simple 'is it ok to do on this map or not' type of 
update.

  But I do think giving someone permanent or at will ethereal travel will be 
very powerful, even with some of the limitations.  The fact is that lots of maps 
have enough wall space where an ethereal creature could effectively hide out 
away from any attackers.   I'd certainly much rather temporary items (potions) 
be added first and see what that breaks.


  I'm also a bit reluctant to add tons of new movement types.  After all, at 
some level, the movement type is the same, what is different is that some things 
may move through spaces better than others.

  So rather than adding a desert movement type (or camel), I'd rather desert 
have a high enough slow move penalty to make it very slow to move through, and 
then give camels some ability to ignore that (built in desert movement skill or 
something).

  Similar for forest and jungles - I'm not sure I want a new movement type, vs 
making it painfully slow enough you have the appropriate skills.