Block Players From Being Able To Build Stairs On Fourth Story

[vonVile]

Since the game currently has a limit to how high you're able build up the game needs to have a built in measure to not allow you to construct stairs. I was in the process of building a tower style safe house when I put down a staircase to go up to the fifth level. I walked up the stairs only to discover there was no floor after the stairs and fell back to the fourth level injuring myself. If the game is limiting how high we can go I shouldn't be allowed to place a staircase at all at the highest level set so not waste materials and then discover I can't go any higher while getting hurt.

[Dreadhawk177]

Yeah, that gets annoying. I wonder what technical limitations keeps you from building up there? I f you find a mod that'll let you go higher, tell me!

[D_Malachi]

Probably a limitation of the current map engine, but it would be nice to have the ability to build taller structures. Though on point, yeah, preventing things like that, which could kill you in some situations if you were to fall to the ground floor from that height, would be quite vital.

[Realmkeeper]

Yeah, that gets annoying. I wonder what technical limitations keeps you from building up there? I f you find a mod that'll let you go higher, tell me!

Well, the most glaringly obvious would be

1) AI Pathfinding: Depending of course on the type of pathfinding used for the zombies (and probably a more complex equivalent for the upcoming NPCs), the navmesh would increase by rather a lot with every new 'level' up the map that you could expand. Considering it seems that player-made structures currently do not have an indoor/outdoors explicitly defined, it is highly unlikely that there's any form of optimisation or limitation on how far out from player-made stairs the pathfinding algorithm can search. Think of it as basically for every floor added, an entire new map (at least for that area/sector)is added to be potentially navigated, regardless if it is passable terrain or thin air.

2) Graphical limitations: With it already having been said in several Mondoids that the current render engine using sprites in an isometric perspective is incredibly performance intensive, and the layering/ordering of sprites is highly complex, I would extrapolate that to say that quite simply managing the layering and/or opacity of sprites for walls and other objects between the camera and the player would have a non-linear complexity. You really don't want to be trying to factor in all the walls and objects from a 10 story building while the player is walking along the far side of it.

3) Memory limitations: Considering a lot of players already struggle to play with the current memory allowances, do we really want to be adding a whole lot more (potentially another 25% of what is already used. Currently 4 floors, adding another) data that needs to be stored, managed, and loaded whenever a player ventures near the location of said extended map? Or an even worse case - if each level already exists as an empty floor on every sector of the map, waiting to be filled; Each additional possible level upwards (or downwards for cellars) would require the equivalent of an additional entire map!

 

Those are the most obvious limitations, the severity of each all depend on how things are implemented in the game, and all of which can have possible optimisations made to reduce their effect on performance.

There's also scores of other likely limitations, most of which would depend on how things currently work, and how future-proof the engine has been written looking forward to future updates.

[Rathlord]

Should be made irrelevant once the new rendering system is in regardless. Wouldn't be worth the time to fix when it could potentially change in the very near future.