Subject: Re: world (fwd)
From: Jari P Saukkonen (jsaukkon@cs.Helsinki.FI)
Date: Fri Nov 26 1999 - 18:36:19 EET
> From: Christian Mayer <Vader@t-online.de> > > It's about the flat shape of the world. > > I thought that it would be great to have a torus (i.e. the shape e.g. of > a car tyre or an o-ring (if there's such a thing in English)) shaped > world. The people would live on the inside of the torus. > > Advantages would be: > - a finite area for the world (like a sphere), so a traveler could > start walking in one direction and would reach that point again > after some time. Torus-shaped world is a very nice idea, it has it advantages, but IMO the current "flat & infinite" model works better, because if we need more land in the future it'd be quite easy to increase the land area by increasing the map without changing existing distances. Also, the distances in the torus would be different depending whether the player is near to the centre of the torus or not. > - the stars get an simple explanation: they are the lights of distant > towns. If the town lights can be visible, then the whole torus would be atleast partly visible. Also, wrapping (currently) square map to the surface of a torus would result in huge stretching of the map. If we try to make the scale more uniform it would result in a very "bloated donut". The distance to travel around the world on the inner side of the torus would be very short. (I have other counterarguments also, these are just examples :)) ++dazzt --- | Jari Saukkonen + jari.saukkonen@cs.helsinki.fi : coral -. | programming music graphics | dolphin : | art keyboards web | nah-kolor | +------------------------------------------------+-----------' | Babylon5-inspired 'shadow function' 0 <= t <= 4*pi/3 : x(t) = (sin 8t)^2 * (5 + 3sin 8t) cos (t/2 + (sin 8t)^2) . y(t) = +-(sin 8t)^2 * (5 + 3cos 8t) sin (t/2 + (sin 8t)^2)
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