Re: Ideal wilderness versus town sizes
Molly: That's almost exactly what I was referring to. Your description of the layered setup of 4D makes a lot of sense, and I'm glad to see that there's at least one example of it in use.
As I mentioned before, ours is only two scales, largely for the same reasons as 4D: updating old areas is time consuming and it sometimes breaks them. The idea of requiring the scales to be inside each other is an interesting one; right now there are obvious scale transitions when moving from one scale to another, but there's no requirement that smaller rooms be 'inside' of larger rooms.
A more strictly hierarchical structure may make more sense, and at least opens up a new avenue of thought. On the other hand, it may kill portal and cross zone linkages in those places where they're appropriate.
-dentin
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