Wagonway, Fast Travel

[joedobo 1,187]

Wagonway, fast travel

Please keep in mind the spirit of this idea is to provide a somewhat convenient (geographic proximity would be the only use inconvenience) and fast travel option. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagonway

A wagonway is a special type of road that you drive on with your cart or perhaps even a horse. It lets you go much faster then normal and the cart automatically follows the road. Yes, you can push "x" and zoom zoom to your destination afk. You will need to manually stop the cart (press any button you normally do to stop auto forward) and get off the Wagonway by turning the vehicle. These should require community effort to construct and maintain. How much faster can we go? Well the answer depends on how faster one can go without causing trouble for the server hardware...5x speed modifier and a 20km/h cart would let you really blaze. A cool aspect of this is you could sit back and admire the scenery while traveling. I've always like letting someone else drive .

I think there should be few of these. It should not become a replacement for roads. My reason are two, it mimics the semi truck and train relationship in RL and helps to aid in game balance. Here are restrictions to help balance the very advantageous travel aspect.

1. Difficult to build: materials like slabs, ribbons, requiring imping to high ql, and high difficulty to pave, wagonway tiles don't fit in large cart(build on site) are all good complements to the goal. I prefer a stone structure. It could be made from metal like railroad ties.

2. Aggressive slope restriction: the adjacent orientations (E-W when the road goes N-S) must be flat, and the parallel orientation has a max slope of 5. Ideally players will equally choose to tunnel, surface mine and build dirt ramps. We will need the ability to pave rock and cave floor tiles with the wagonway paver.

3. Large turning radius: no sharp 90 degree turns many roads have. I tried, with no success, to come up with some calculus equation lines to demonstrate. As the road is built the game would use the road's center to draw a line and check turning radius. with this data it would decided what tiles are available to extend the road.

4. High maintenance: Decay and destruction should occur if not maintained. A random chance and a use-based are both good. Put another way, a high chance just by nature and even more so with use. I'd like to see a tile require maintenance every one to two weeks. No maintenance for about month or a little less and it falls apart. We can always scale back the decay later, local people should be encouraged to pitch in and maintain a portion.

- no special carts because it defies the goal of being convenient for travelers.

- This could apply to horse and cart drivers alike.

- No player will be allowed to kos or set up tolls on the wagonway, no exceptions.

- I'm not sure how to handle the event where a traveler runs into a missing section of road, maybe it decayed. The considerate choice would be to stop the vehicle. We could also cause the cart to sharply change a random direction and keep driving.

- Is it possible to have the road's quality affect speed? The time spent on a single tile is short making this difficult. It might be possible to use a group of tiles and averages. It seems simpler to use a single multiplier of your mount/vehicle's max speed.

I'm open to suggestions to modify this, with the exception of three: 1) auto alignment while "x" driving forward, 2) going slower than 35 km/h, 3) allowing tolls. This is my idea, I came up with, so I humbly ask the devs to respect these.

*Edit*

- Wagonway should be around 3 tiles wide to give the game mechanics plenty of room for orientation adjustments. Two tiles would be ok If game mechanics can reliably orientate. I like 3 tiles better.

- Vehicles won't auto align with roads when they intersect with a Wagonway. Road are always broken, not the WW. We should do a slower alignment action so folks can drive across the WW and not get jerked around a lot. The game should be able to determine between gradual orientation changes and drastic or large changes.

- The server could store a calculus equation representing the WW, which is a simple line, and use it the decide what orientation a vehicle should use.

- for Y junctions on WW, driver will need to manually turn and align with a choice, otherwise autopilot randomly takes one.

Edited August 2, 2012 by joedobo

[Aetherwalker 1,863]

+1 for this, especially if you could put it in the underground subways many people build between their deeds

[Brash_Endeavors 4,735]

It sounds really intriguing.

[Kadore 926]

As good as it sounds seems like it would be tough to implement with the pathing Wurm currently has and no coding to prevent roads from moving besides just punishment when it occurs.

[joedobo 1,187]

seems like it would be tough to implement with the pathing Wurm currently has and no coding to prevent roads from moving besides just punishment when it occurs.

For path finding all that is need is to orientate the vehicle in a parallel direction with the road. Yes, Wurm doesn't has existent tools to find what orientations is parallel. I don't how hard it would be to make it happen. The wagonway should be 3 to 5 tiles while. That will provided ample room for alignment.

? road from moving besides?....I'm not sure exactly what mean here. When a road and wagonway intersect, the road will be broken. vehicles won't auto align with normal road. When you approach a Y junction the driver will need to choose otherwise autopilot should randomly take a path.

[joedobo 1,187]

edit OP

I'm curious about the fesablity of building something like this? It should be very possible on servers like Deli. The slope restrictions make me to believe it may be almost impossible to make this on Indy. Its a tough balance between building difficulty designed to ensure they don't replace roads but not making them so difficult no one makes them.

[Martynas5 435]

-1

Omg stop making useless mmo like suggestions about fast travel, it is already fast, you can get from gd to north coas in ~20-30min on foot, i'm not even talking about horses and so on.

Long travelling is that makes wurm special ( i mean then you have to travel from north to south and face dangerous creatures, find decayed corpses with coins and other intriguing stuff)

[bp1986 173]

The 5x speed sounds a bit too much. If anything, I would think a railway using nothing more than gravity would be more appropriate. As for people charging tolls for it, the major issue that has happened in the past with major travel projects is some random guy deeding it and then demanding payment for passage. I don't have the case in front of me, but to my understanding, the deeder had nothing to do with the project itself.

Honestly, I find myself rather against this idea. While I would like pavement or some other terrain types to have SOME effect on horses/carts, this feels too automated for my taste. If this were knocked down to +3 KM/h while on the road and no auto turning, then I could support it.

[joedobo 1,187]

The 5x speed sounds a bit too much. If anything, I would think a railway using nothing more than gravity would be more appropriate. As for people charging tolls for it, the major issue that has happened in the past with major travel projects is some random guy deeding it and then demanding payment for passage. I don't have the case in front of me, but to my understanding, the deeder had nothing to do with the project itself.

Honestly, I find myself rather against this idea. While I would like pavement or some other terrain types to have SOME effect on horses/carts, this feels too automated for my taste. If this were knocked down to +3 KM/h while on the road and no auto turning, then I could support it.

lol...100 km/h. hehe, I didn't expect that go well Evil, tolls; When I was playing Qex on JKH, and was part of Phoenix Enterprises, Lando wanted to put houses and fences across all his roads so he could charge folks tolls to pass. Then you didn't even need deeds. Deeds and roads are tough subject, I very much on the deed's right side.

Auto follow is the most important feature. I'm pretty sure the motivation to ask about fast travel orginated from the fact that is not fun to spend a half hour or more toggleing back and forth between "e" and "q" keys to keep your cart on the road. We also need to make sure the slowest cart can out run the fastest mob. So a cart with 9km/h horses can outrun a cham ven troll on the wagonway.