[Molly]

This is something I totally agree with. Both as a player and as a builder, I get extremely irritated with areas that cannot be mapped logically on a grid. That doesn't mean that all areas have to be laid out as grids of course, I accept both grid areas and linear areas, as long as the map is logical, so that if you go east from room A to room B, going west again should bring you back to room A. (The only exeption from this rule for me is mazes, where some of the rooms usually are linked in "circles" to provide the maze effect).

In 4D we generally deal with the scale problem by working with three different scales; 1. Wilderness, 2. City and 3. House scale, meaning that a city is set inside one wilderness room, and a house is set inside one city room.
A city or village may consist of anything between 5 or 300 rooms, and a house or castle might have between 1 and 100 rooms.

For instance the Wilderness scale is used for large forests, grasslands, desert and sea in the Prehistoric Dimension and for open space in the Future Dimension. The City scale is used for islands and planets, as well as for cities and villages. From the main grid in the wilderness scale you enter cities, islands or planets, usually by going up or down from the main grid, or by entering a gateway. In the main grid you can pass around the city or island, sometimes entering it from all 4 directions, sometimes just through one entrance, for instance through the city gate in a walled city.

This makes the maps pretty logical. Even if the big 100 room city only represents a single room in the wilderness grid, the entrance room makes it obvious when you go from one scale to another.

We use no exact measurements in feet or meter, since the size of each room obviously may vary a lot even within the three main scales. But the proportions are something like 5m - 20m - 1000m side of the square in each scale.

I must confess that we are not totally consistent with this setup, however. 4D has been under development for over 10 years, and particularly the Medieval Dimension, being the oldest one, has a more traditional mud layout, since we didn't start to work with grids and travel zones until the mud had been running for several years. The travel grids are mostly used in the Prehistoric and Future Dimensions, which came natural, since one is based on sea travel and the other on space.

If I could start from scratch today, I'd probably use the 3 scale concept consistently, since it works very well. But that would mean scrapping around 100 old zones, and I just cannot get myself to do that. Call me lazy, call me sentimental, but I always hated seeing a lot of work going down the drain.

As long as the maps are reasonably logical, I can live with a few inconsistencies. It's after all just a mud, not the real life. And playability is a lot more important to me than total realism.