We could always have an omod script that asks what realism options you want, a bit like OOO does.

Yes, thats probobaly the best approach. Is it possible to block out fast travel completly though? Or is it hard-coded? I guess we could just remove the map-markers.

It should be possible - other mods do it. They just tell you "you cannot fast travel at this time" if you try. I'd prefer to leave in the map markers, assuming you've been there once.

A few further thoughts about fast travel:

There could be a 'Guild of Travellers' which enables fast travel off the main routes. Without membership the player can only use carts, convoys, ships, etc. in the civilised world, but doesn't allow outside that.

Joining the guild allows the member to hire armed escorts, enabling fast travel elsewhere. Basic rank allows hire of one escort, and fast travel within low risk zones. Increasing rank allows more/tougher escorts, allowing travel within more dangerous zones. On arrival, the escorts stay in place for 24 hours, or longer if you pay more or have higher rank. You can rejoin them to fast travel elsewhere within that period, or else you have to walk!

However, they are not companions - they won't follow you into caves, ruins, etc. They're just a fast travel resource, though they will help defend you and themselves from any adversaries at the arrival point. If you don't pay before the time limit they will return home. If you follow them they won't defend you; staying with them for more than a limited time may decrease your rank or end membership in the guild. Of course, they should always be available if you pay...

If you use them as a defence resource by fleeing to them from a beast, you risk them being killed and having to walk home. You could also book an escort to be waiting for you at a particular map marker on a particular date. This would allow the player to fast travel to a cavern entrance, traverse the cavern to a different exit, then fast travel home.

Progress in the guild could be by doing quests; escorting others to their destination. Slow travel of course! This could reveal more map markers and reveal lore and rumours as a side-effect. As well as dealing with the dangers en route!


There could also be additional fast travel opportunities outside this guild; for example, members of a religion may have fast travel between shrines, even if that is across a risky region. Effectively they hire temple bodyguards for the journey.

It means dividing Mesogea into zones of risk - would that be technically feasible from the modder point of view? Can the fast travel trigger be intercepted to check this? It should also apply to any third-party mods that add to Mesogea - any additional map marker in a risk zone should adhere to the travel rules for that zone.

That could work well, though might take a lot of scripting. What about having caravans leaving places at set times The player will have to either hire themselves into the caravan as a guard or pay to be taken as a passenger. We could intercept the fast travel if anything substantial happens to the caravan.

We could then work this in by sending the entire caravan to a set location, so that the player arrives with everyone, which would feel quite immersive. The characters of the caravan would then go about their own lives.

The choice for the player would be to come back to a caravanserai for fast travel by caravan, or set out alone.

I am not sure if it is possible, but would we be able to physically have a caravan travelling over distance?

The player would, taking into account your ideas, have to become of worth to the caravan to be hired, or have enough money to pay.

For fast travel, I think that we're trying to pull together 3 goals:

1) Convenience for the player.
2) Real-world immersion, realism.
3) Practicality of modding/scripting.

1) is satisfied by the vanilla Ob method, but I think we all agree it detracts from 2).
2) gives us various ideas, but some of them could make 3) much harder.

We know we can instantaneously 'zap' the player to a different location, as well as any NPCs. 3) is trivial here, but 2) is a bit compromised. Building in a few rules, such as the NPCs leaving after a period (slow or zap), should be doable and add realism.

As you suggest, a wonderful goal for 2) would be dynamic convoys and vessels. Caravan trains that walk to the next serai, ships that sail, via waypoints, to a faraway shore. We should be able to implement convoys, as it's just a group of travellers with a goal. Pathing may be an issue, but if mods like Tamriel Travellers can do it, so should we! As mentioned earlier, there's a shipping mod in development. We'd need to ensure the convoy travels as a group rather than stretch out along the road. There should also be some sort of scheduling - if you miss a convoy or ship, you'll have to wait for another one. This would allow us to choose fast travel with a convoy, or we could encounter one on the roads while slow travelling. Great immersion!

A convoy would have its own escorts whose costs would be shared amongst the travellers. That would be the fast travel cost for that route. If we can implement risk zones, we could build that in to the cost if the route goes through more dangerous areas.

I'd still say that caravans and convoys would only ply the 'main' routes as they comprise merchants, messengers and others with a common destination; they wouldn't go off the beaten track to some obscure ruin just because you want to go there. For this, you should need a personal escort whose sole task is to get you safely there. I think 2) would be enhanced if you had to be able to defend yourself before anyone would accompany you to risky zones, else you're a liability. That's where the idea of ranks within a Travellers' Guild comes from. I think it keeps 1), enhances 2), but the problem will be 3).

We could implement this by risk zoning; I think the main technical challenge would be figuring out which zone a map marker is in. In more abstract mapping terms it's easy; overlaid zones or layers of increasing risk, say A-D. If a marker is in Zone A, Zone B, Zone C but not Zone D, then it's clearly a Zone C marker. How we would do that in CS I don't know - yet! Is there a way of building attributes or values into the logical game map? Can we have separate internal maps, each representing a risk layer? Such a map would just be a binary of yes/no. Feed in a marker's coordinates, and yes or no is the result. Another issue would be intercepting the fast travel trigger. I reckon if it can be disabled (mods do this), it could be intercepted and the check done. If I learn how to script, I'll have a look into this.

Of course, it could be that you meet the occasional crazy berserker dude that will escort you to the savage wilds, but these should be uncommon and expensive, unlike the guild that would be in all main towns.

Other guilds could have their own routes and conditions, some could be quest specific.

We could do this by region. I am sure that the CS can identify the region type. Or even by setting up specific places where guards can be hired, choosing the guard, choosing the location and working out the danger of the location itself by some kind of marker.

ie. Illusidum safe. score 2. Astaroth very dangerous score 8. Equals 18 so level of cost= 200 coins.
Hithorion safe score 3 (worse than Illusidum) move to Illusidum (score 2) = 5. cose =50 coins.

Could that help?

Yep, that sounds like the sort of thing that would be ideal!

We'll have to be careful about the region mapping. What happens if you're in a low risk zone, want to travel to another, but the only route is through higher risk? I suppose that's the point of organised convoys, so the cost is built in. It's more of an issue if you want to pay for escorted fast travel to a medium risk location, but the only route is through a high risk area. If we design the risk zones cleverly that won't be an issue; we just have the higher risk zones as isolated 'islands', so they never block off a medium risk zone. We can have low risk islands as long as they are convoy-connected.

It is entirely possible that the player can hire escorts to fast travel along a convoy route, but it should always cost more than joining the convoy itself. I suppose it may be more convenient - fast horses, not having to wait hours for departures, etc. Maybe just for showing off - the ancient equivalent of driving a Ferrari!

I also suggest we put maximum time limits on any one journey, say 12 hours. This will avoid the hunger/sleep mod problem, as well as force the player to realise that Mesogea is BIG! OK it takes a way a little from the convenience, but it's still a lot better than walking. A compromise that I suspect is worth it. I wouldn't expect to play a Roman Empire RPG that would allow me to fast zap from the Gask Ridge to Palmyra.

It means we'll have to work out a method of limiting the journey distance. Perhaps we can limit travel to within a simple radius from present location. We could also be clever about distance covered by transport method - whether by foot, mule or thoroughbred horse.

It might be easier just to use a giant if statement to check for available travel destinations. For example: if the player is in town A, they can travel to town B, C or D only, and the price is set by the scripter based on the regions they are traveling through, perhaps with a little random thrown in and with the final amount adjusted by variables like speechcraft, fame/infamy, faction, etc. That way, you avoid the headache of trying to script a region-detector with complicated algorithms. If the scripter knows that in order to travel from town A to town B they have to go through moderately hostile terrain, they can just add a multiplier to the cost. Here's a clearer example in pseudocode:



Not the most efficient code, for sure, but dead simple and easy to update. The other advantage to this is that the distance is limited because each guide is only going to offer a select list of destinations. Most guides/caravans/whatever aren't going to go just anywhere, so there is another role-playing aspect of trying to find reliable guides that want to take you where you want to go. Every time the player asks a guide for fast travel, the guide's script can update the global playersCurrentLocation variable, store an id for the player's destination and call the travel script with the two variables as parameters to get the cost. I don't know how that would interface with the existing fast travel feature, so it might have to be simulated with a moveto or something, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.

That will work well for the main routes which are predefined. For convoys, caravans, etc, I suggest they have only one destination - take it or leave it! It's the equivalent of a bus/train service.

However the point about hired escorts is they're more like taxis - you can go from anywhere to anywhere, assuming the destination is within a day's travel and you can hire someone to take you to that risk zone. We can't path out all the possibilities, let alone 3rd party mods, so we'd need something generic for that.

If we can use the 'engage' trigger for map marker-based fast travel, I'm sure we can script a bit of maths and conditionality to handle it.

Can we extract coordinates of mapmarkers? Simple Pythagoras:

distance = SQRT( (Xdest - Xhere)^2 + (Ydest - Yhere)^2)

Multiply by a suitable constant to get km. Umm... I'm assuming we can script this sort of maths OK?

If our current speed (on foot, horse, etc.) is v km per hour, then we have a max range of (12 * v) in 12 hours. Hence distance must be <= 12v for fast travel allowed.

If we have travellers guild rank, this represents allowable risk zone. Hence:

can_travel = ( (rank >= destination_risk) AND (distance <= (12 * v) ) )

The cost calculation may be more complex, depending on rank, risk, distance, number of escorts, availability and indeed some randomness! Maybe it costs more at weekends and public holidays... Open for suggestions!

That sounds perfectly feasible. How difficult would it be to implement?

Well technically, I've no idea yet. I'm still at the bottom of the scripting learning curve, so it'll take a wee while before I can do anything useful. That shouldn't stop the functional design though - if I'm scripting something the design should be in place before I write any code.

For hired escort travel, we have a few requirements.

1) The PC should know the cost before committing to hire/travel.
2) The PC should choose transport type i.e. foot, horse, anything else.

I suggest that there should be a 'paddock' of the Travellers' Guild on the edge of towns. The PC can ride into the paddock, thus staying on horse or other mount. The number of escorts nEsc will be be a function of destination risk, f(rDest), perhaps a straight 1:1 where nEsc = f(rDest) = rDest. Hence travel to risk 3 would need 3 escorts. We can tailor the numbers to suit, and work out the cost accordingly.

The escorts will have horses or other mounts; we need to identify these as well as PC mount to work out the speed of slowest. This speed will define the maximum range for one journey.

I suggest that fast travel is only allowed when the player is in the paddock. The number of available escorts may be variable - we may want it that few escorts are available sometimes - maybe a random factor or other rules.

While in the paddock the player clicks the destination mapmarker, causing a dialog box to appear. This either explains that travel is not possible (too far, too risky for guild rank or available escorts) , or displays the cost. The player can choose to commit or cancel. Committing subtracts the payment then relocates the PC and escorts to the destination, adding time appropriately.

The escort group will stay there for 24 hours. They can be paid to stay for another 24 hours, or reengaged for further fast travel.

This is the tricky point - how can the player choose to fast travel from there? Can vicinity to escorts be used to flag 'travel allowed' as there is no paddock? Clearly the player can't do this while far from the escorts, so we need to do something with vicinity. The other issue is what happens after 24 hours - should the escorts be tasked with walking/riding back home? Should they just disappear when the PC reenters that cell? I don't know what's possible here.

Suggestions?

I wonder if it could be scripted in by escort. We have escorts for certain trips, a kind of post house Roman style system run either by private enterprise or the Imperial system. The Imperial system will allow you to pay at any post house and choose destination, the post master will allocate you permission to use the road (ala Persian style under Cyrus etc where even a chicken had to have the Kings permission - a good tax gimmick).

How about this way:

Imperial system: enter post house, post master has list of destinations you can go to. You choose, you pay, escort allocated from a pool of NPC's by cost. To destination arriving with the Escort for realism then escort disappear into a private room for sleep and rest etc.

Private system. Various characters hang around taverns and so forth. They will go with you to locations (each have locations they are willing to travel to and have contacts able to arrange the permits within the city states - the roads are the Emperors and for the military primarily.) You pay, you go, they arrive with you and after a short while leave. You can pay them to wait for a day, two days etc. After that period they go back.

Its like hiring a specialist who knows the region, who can grease palms and get you there. Their reputation is their bond. However will some drop you out of fast travel and try to rob you? Will some steal things during fast travel?

Just another set of ideas...

I do like the idea of disparate characters who can act as guides. The only potential problem with individual characters is if the destination choice and commit is done by dialogue. This means that all available destinations would have to be scripted into the dialogue, which would rule out any third party location mods. I still favour a method that uses the map. Again, perhaps we could do something with guide proximity - or even you reserve a guide prior to map selection. That may work - you talk to a guide to reserve him for 5 mins, then use the map to select destination. Or even vice versa - choose the current destination, then chat to the guide to find cost and commit.

If we limit it to one guide, that would work - if they're levelled, then higher risk zone means tougher guide. Or maybe some guides don't do danger - divergence of availability, more realism.

I also think we should have a risk level that no guides go to. This allows us reserved zones, such as a mountain top where capricious deities live, or just places we want to reserve for quest reasons.

That sounds good, the trouble wont be is it physically workable but can we do it with our limited team? What would be the easiest etc. The reason I said fixed locations is that many other locations can be accessed from a few dozen main hubs, such as you want to fast travel to a quarry in Karithia. A guide in Hithorion is known to be able to get you to the border for a price. At the border you go to the Caravanserai nearest the drop off. Again, as you are on the Karithian border you can hire a guide to get you as far as the city of XXXXX being much closer to the quarry. At XXXXX more local guides can get you to village YYYYY from that village it is only a day to the quarry/ That cuts down more than a week or so of game time (hours of mundane travel) to ten minutes plus ten minutes walking or riding to the exact destination. The network of guides could be with just a few dozen hub locations built up of lots of individuals, we can base them at the obvious and less obvious places and hence quickly thicken up the NPC pot and bring in a real feeling of a diverse country where you cant just get Bob to take you half way across the world through several countries and places where his face is more than likely going to get you robbed or killed. A Holorian guiding you into the depths of Karithia!

Beyond that we could have bodyguards as a seperate entity who go with you for a price. When the cash runs out you are prompted to pay again. Pay up and keep for another week or fail and off they go! We could then trigger fast travel to be enabled with the bodyguard if we wish to. I think that to calculate the whole thing would be hugely difficult.

If we can do the levelled bodyguard distance, risk thing by map then I am more happy with that than what I have suggested, or the two could combine ignoring the bodyguard suggestion I made. But if its going to be hugely difficult then we might have to just go with the easier, second best route.

I dont entertain any thoughts of dictating which route we go. Its a team thing.

Thoughts?