Okay. This is, like, a really really long post about what is probably a relatively insignificant pet peeve... and yet I want to make sure that I'm not going totally crazy here, so I'm putting this out for other people's comments and/or flames and/or suggestions of "Goddayum, woman, you have way too much time on your hands" and so forth. So y'all have been warned. So. Arcanum is supposed to be big. Really big. HHGTTG big. So one day I asked myself, "Okay, how big is it, actually?" So I got out WorldEd, pulled out the main map, and started doin' me some mathematics. The basics I have are as follows: * There's two distinct units of measure on the game map; I don't know what the actual terms are, so I'm calling them "sectors" and "steps". (Sectors are what are numbered in map coordinates. A step is one of those little squares you can stand in.) * Sectors are 64 steps square. So with this information, I decided to go by the old pencil/paper RPG standard of one square or step == one yard. Simple, right? So, as a test of this, I decide to calculate the distance from Shrouded Hills to Tarant as the crow flies and see how the travel times match up. Shrouded Hills is located at 1409W, 1317S; Tarant is at 972W, 1029S. Difference between those figures is 442W, 292S. Applying the Pythagorean Theorem suggests that the hypothetical diagonal line between the two of them is 529.74 sectors. Now, here's where I run into issues. Each sector is approximately 64 "steps" long, right? And we're thinking one "step" is one yard here, right? 529.74 * 64 == approximately 33903 yards. That equates to... 19.26 miles. Which is about the same distance as my cross-town commute every day. That seems a little short, I say to myself. How short is it? Well, the average walking speed for a human being is about three miles per hour. Therefore, assuming no interruptions, this distance would be traversed in about... six and a half hours. I go back into the game, start up a journey from Shrouded Hills to Tarant. It takes, oh, about a week or so in game-time. Something is very very wrong here, I say to myself. So I try to go based on travel times, to see what the "real" distance of a "step" is. Okay. Say it's about a week. Assume, say, ten hours of travel per day for five days to get there. At three miles per hour, that makes it 150 miles away, or 792,000 feet. That would seem to make more sense. Very good. So, we had 529.74 sectors, and 64 steps per sector, divide that up, and we get... um, 23.36 feet per step. Okay, I've got long legs, but not that long. Maybe it's the Pythagorean Theorem we're doing wrong. Silly viqsi! How dare you try to use complex math?! So let's just go with the figures we had above - 442W and 292S. This is a total of 734 sectors assuming you go straight north and then straight east - or 46,976 sectors. Going back to our 150 mile distance figure from the last paragraph, and that gets us... 16.86 feet per step. Sorry, still ridiculous. Maybe we're not using the Pythagorean Theorem enough, tho! Silly viqsi! How dare you dismiss math?! Some quick mathematics determines that a sector is 90.5 steps across on the diagonal. That's a lot. Multiply that by our 529.74 sectors representing the Hypothetical Diagonal Line from Shrouded Hills to Tarant, and we get 47,941.47 sectors. Hey, that figure's pretty close to the 46,976 sectors we had in the last paragraph, isn't it? Yes, it is, and it reduces the amount of distance per step by a whole four inches, to 16.52 feet per step. Yeah, that's still a bit too far for my legs to reach. So. Either my math is way off, or my counting sectors and steps here is way off, or the travel times are way way way inflated in Arcanum - almost by a factor of 10. And at the moment I'm inclined to believe Option #3. So... WTF d00ds? Am I right on this travel thing, or did I miss something, or am I completely crazy for worrying about this to begin with?
You sleep during night, don't you? And when you're walking long distances you need to pause sometimes to rest. Add that to time spent eating, stopping for random reasons and similar stuff and maybe, maybe, we're getting closer. I'm not saying that Troika did the travelling-system perfect, but there's more to travel than walking.
Good point, but this is why I assumed only 10 hours travel per day, rather than a solid 24 hours. (ten for travel, eight for sleep, six for Random Other Stuff)
Don't worry, you're not crazy. If you were, you would try running the distance and measuring the time (takes about 30mins I think, with dex=18), perhaps actually try counting steps taken. Also, consider positoning the party so that the journey would be only along the horizontal. That will make the math almost non-exixtant simple. Maybe simply run say, 10 sectors and mesure the actual time taken, see how much off will this time be compared to going back these 10 sectors, in worldmap-travel mode. But yeah, generally the time when world-map-travelling is greatly inflated, as covering the same distance in-game takes less in-game time. Of course it takes a certian degree of insanity to spend 30mins clicking on the ground to get from a town to another. Isn't that how it works in multiplayer ?
No, you're not crazy for pointing that out. I haven't heard someone question it yet. However, there's a pretty simple explanation. Consider how long it takes you to cross SH, from one side of the town to the other. It might take you about a minute in real-time, but plenty of game time will pass. Or, leave your game for 10 minutes and come back. A lot more than 10 game minutes will have passed. In order for it to seem like time is passing, and to experience different locations at different times of the day, 1 real-time minute is not equal to 1 game minute. Likewise, the area of the continent of Arcanum is not equivalent to the area required for development of Arcanum's cities, and the size of Tarant isn't sufficient to explain the development of a modern economy, and it doesn't have a factory for each of the items you can buy at the store. Arcanum's population, too, can be considered symbolic. I'd guess that Tarant would have a population of closer to 1 million. However, the game still has to account for the conversion of time and distance. Throw out the conversion figures you considered for tiles-feet and realseconds-gameseconds and measure Arcanum's in-game environment if you want to know if worldmap travel is right. Calculate the time it would take players of different speed to cross certain distances, and it might turn out that you are right on that level instead.
I'm familiar with the concept, but at the time that term was managing to escape me for some reason. I blame my mother; she also forgets simple words at inconvenient times. The "also" bit there is kind of intriguing. That would certainly explain that initial figure of 23.36 feet per step - just about eight yards. Hmmmmm.
This is also very true, and has a little bit to do with what prompted this thought of mine, honestly. As Everything Is On One Map, I was hoping that the whole time-and-space-distortion thing that normally goes on in RPGs might be mitigated or otherwise removed here. Alas. That and every once in a while the ambitious little girl in the back of my mind sometimes starts going on about creating a Grandiose New Mod in which there's factories for every product and farmland surrounding each city producing enough for all the people and many grand multistory buildings in Tarant and Caladon and apartment complexes in Tarant and Caladon and Ashbury for random folk and more people and abandoned farmland in Dernholm and houses you can buy and houses you can build and cities you can watch develop and more clothing options that can help you out at social gathering sidequests and... and then I realize that this would be trying to turn my RPG into SimCity and I don't actually have that much free time and so I quiet down.
It's really not necessary to go at someone for just forgetting a word. I think it's pretty clear that the term just escaped Viqsi, but even if he/she was totally wrong, correction would be sufficient. This happens to me too. Like, every time I sit down to mod. My problem is, though, that it happens when i write the dialogs and scripts too, meaning that I do way more than is necessary for a single individual, so I don't know how I could add scripts to a million more people. However, the draw to build more cities and map locations happens to me quite frequently, I really have to restrain it
Northern point 150S. Southern point 1900S Eastern point 155W, Western point 1800W 1tile=1meter Arcanum is 112x105 km. Comparing with Israel, 424x114 km, and look how much stuff happened there. Bible etc.. As for travel distance. Your assumed travel speed/distance assumes ideal travel conditions. No weight, straight line, asphalt. They got, bad roads, if at all. There are no roads displayed in the game... Overweight( all that armor and food and other junk is sure heavy and cumbersome). and for certain it is not a straight line distance. And life danger, btw. And navigate through all this. 5km per hour? More like 1. Im not at all surprised by game travel times.
Roller, while I prize your ability to learn, through which you moved on to fresher topics, I must insist you take a step further in this direction and cease your gravedigging at all. In case you still fail to see why gravedigging is considered a bad habit, I ask you only to humor us and, in the future, start new threads linking to the old ones, in case you'd be willing to bring up other old topics. Honestly, this way everyone may be happy - you won't be receiving any complaints like this one, by which you increase the chance of an actual discussion ensuing, and the rest of the forum community won't be troubled by your braking the forum rules. On topic - try running to any location on the worldmap in Arcanum - or simply run for about 5 minutes in one direction, and measure the in-game time that has elapsed. Then go back in the worldmap travel mode and compare results. This is an inconsistency in game design, and no amount of explaining will rectify it. Also, it is pretty much an unimportant point anyways, since time ingame is quite meaningless - you don't die of old age, there aren't any time restrictions and overall, the passage of time is just about distinguishing night and day.
I think direct navigation just doesnt account things like resting or pathfinding. If it would, travels, and the game in general, would become far too time consuming. Quick travel on the other hand has no probs to correctly calculate time.. Understandably so since it only takes a minute. Come to think about it i have never seen a game which forces resting, BG1 maybe.
Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 penalise you for not taking the occasional break, although the travel times are even more rediculous there than in Arcanum. (Especially if, like me, you've been gaming in Faerun for years.) Roller, please, when you find something interesting like this in an old thread, could you please start a new one and just link back to the old one? You're balancing precariously on the line between annoying and the admins saying 'Ban-Hammer Time'.
