JohnCarver wrote:neored9 wrote:I recall Jorb or Loftar saying that bridges weren't possible due to fluid mechanics or something to do with the way tiles are controlled. Are you calling them lazy assholes, and if so lol?
From my time with Jorb & Loftar I have realized that they much prefer a more formal and elegant implementation opposed to our mentality at times to get the desired effect by any means possible. I don't want to speak for their behalf but if I were to guess they were more interested in bridges that had traditional Z axis height so that canoes could pass under them along with all the other nice-things that would come with a correct and thorough implementation. It could be our naive viewpoint or inexperience, but we care more about the end-result which is in this case getting from point A (one side of the river) to point B (the other side of the river). Therefore, Our solution is to simply turn the river tiles into "bridge" tiles and be done with it. All our talks with JLo lead us to believe this is possible, but probably nothing like the real bridges they were probably envisioning when they made that statement.
You don't actually need a real Z-axis to have real bridges. All you would need would be some flag, for the player, saying "on the bridge", or more generally "above the ground". Then you would need a change in the client to display the player on top of the bridge instead of terrain when this flag is set. And then, depending on from which side you enter the bridge tile, flag would be raised or not. Of course, there's much more to it than just displaying, and it's more bug-prone etc. But it could be used for stuff like bridges between cliffs, ramps, maybe even tunnels
