That is the point. Path of least resistance. Coding wise. It is less likely to have crap in that space and if a boat already exists. That would play out the same way as a car crashing into another car. Except worse. It would almost be certain doom. The game by default wouldn’t spawn anything down there AND we could have barge homes on the river banks + ports + docks!
The problem is that it’s not the path of least resistance. There’s the same amount of resistance, it’s just harder to debug, and carries the additional issue that bridges are narrower than they are long, so long boats would be much harder to fit inside than long trucks on the bridge.
Again, the work needed is identical. If you implement one, you’ve automatically done all the coding work for the other, the only difference would be on the map files.
Why not just tell people in the game when making a boat that the system has limits to the design. When you design the under-bridge z-level area. Just make that area really large to fit the maximum. So in short. No ocean liners. Just speed boats, dinghies, row boats, and private cruisers etc.
That’s just reducing the ‘reward’ for doing the work more and more: now it’s not something that can be used for elevators, bridges, parking garages and player-made underground parking, but something that works solely for under-bridge boating.
And once again, you’re reducing the amount of players that would be exposed to it, so you’re getting less bug reports, so it takes longer to go from the boat-only implementation to something that can be applied on more places in the game.
Also, what happens when you dig holes from the bridge? What happens when you build a little dock inside and start wailing up with a sledgehammer, then try to build stairs? What happens when explosives go off under the bridge and the roof colapses? If it no longer aligns with the road upstairs, these are all going to be issues.
So exactly how would using ramps make more sense? You have more levels than is needed and you don’t get the same effect with an elevator anyway.
Digging holes…You end up under the bridge like the boat. Except you have water and you drown if not using some breathing system =P
Destroying the bridge is simple. You end up with holes in the bridge you cannot drive over and then you see the tiles below it.
I think the only real solution is an overhaul of how vehicles are handled to place them in a special vehicle-space and then overlay them onto the world, and add some hooks to handle world<->vehicle interactions so zombies can’t grab you through the walls, and so the vehicle can be internally consistent while appearing split across separate z levels and such.
Which sounds like a lot of work.
Damn you and your logicical deductions!! We want sloppy coding and hack kneed crap like that! >_<
Seriously though, this would be a lot more work, yet it would be much more ideal. That said, we had a tragic clusterfu** of the vehicle system once before. It was thankfully killed with fire and forgotten…it was enough to make you beg for bleach to dump in your eyes ;_;
First, you have the exact same number of levels. One for the top of the bridge, one for under the bridge.
As to how ramps make more sense, I’ve already told you, repeatedly:
- It’s easier to fit a vehicle roadwise than across, so no need to mismatch map sizes as you propose and all the artifacts that introduces.
- Once the code is implemented it is identical for bridges, garages and elevators. More benefit for the game for the same amount of coding work.
- You get far more bug testing that way, so bugs get identified and solved faster.
Except you’re proposing for the ‘under the bridge’ to be bigger than the ‘over the bridge’, so where do those holes come out? Because these two maps are not aligned.
If the map underneath is twice as big as the one above, and I dig down a square of four blocks, does that mean I have a square hole in the ceiling twice as big on the underground level? Or does it mean I have four ceiling holes spread out?
If I create four stairs on the underground, does that mean there’s only one stairs above? If I fill the entire underground with stairs, meaning I have four times more up stairs than what you could fit in down stairs aboveground, what decides where each of the extraneous stairs come out?