Since you, Smacky, are re-organising the arches, I have a suggestion on signs.

Rather than move misc/signs and outdoor/sign_big to scenery (and still keep them separate), these should all come together in items/readable/signs. They are active components and not just scenery.

I always wondered why the small sign was in misc, while the signposts, etc. were in outdoor.

Indeed and they will, but it was easier at the time to move signs from misc to where the other sign-like things (message_board and sign_big) were (scenery).

You're absolutely right in your distinction between scenery and activve components (items). There are loads of objects in scenery which need to be moved elsewhere.

Hope that makes sense. So no items/readable/ anymore. We have items/ with subdirs books/ and signs/.

Now I have a question. In scenery/ are many dirs, such as rocks, rocks2, cave, cavewall, dolmen, stonehenge, icecave, and pillars which contain variously some bona fide walls and wall_masks as well as a load of misc objects that are no_pass 1 and sometimes blocksview 1 and sometimes not.

Obviously the actual walls and wall_masks get moved to walls/ but what happens about the rest? Do we say all such rock-like things which are type 79 not 77 are scenery not walls, even if their actual use is as a wall? Or do we differentiate between blocksview 1 (walls) and blocksview 0 (scenery)? The former keeps all rock-things together in one place but the latter is maybe a little less idiosyncratic.

(A further possibility would be to change the type 79 no_pass 1 blocksview 1 layer 5 stuff to type 77 (and for some things like the wall masks in cave/ layer 7) as it should have been in the first place but I'm unsure if this would cause problems on existing maps).

That is some big question... To which I don't know the definitive answer. For example, should trees block view or not. IMO they should (and probably do in the main). And quite often you want scenery to block view, for example on the edge of a map. On the other hand, sometimes it's annoying that a rock has a black void behind it for no apparent reason.

How does blocking view work anyway? From the player's avatar's perspective, I think, whereas shouldn't it be from the camera's perspective? So no black voids - either you can see through something or you can't.

No it looks absolutely stupid if trees and other 'thin' tall obstacles like most pillars are blocksview 1.

In  the default pickmaps you have trees (blocksview 0 by default) and trees_bview (blocksview 1). So in my maps I've adopted/formalised this idea, hence the concept of map 'boundary' objects.

But anyway, forget trees. Concentrate on rocks.

Well, i see all rocks and trees as scenery. Our rock walls and tree walls are walls made from scenery to try and blend edges in. I also think that most of our trees and rocks should not be blocks_view 1, the exception being the very large ones. If we want to make a scenic wall, you have to modify the original arch and put it in a pickmap, as that isn't how one would normally use these scenic archs.

As for the cave walls... well, they are walls aren't they? Aren't walls blocks_view 1? Souldn't they go in the walls folder?

Wall Masks: Not sure if those should go in walls. I mean, sure, they seem like they should, but i already think we have enough objects in the walls folder. I much prefer to go to a different folder for them.

Good job on those signs

Cheers,
Unislash

I think it would be a good idea to separate the pseudo-wall masks from walls so they are easier to find when decorating.

Of course, they are not actual masks, since they share the same type with walls (77). Which is why if you are daft enough to have the "two objects of the same type on same square" box checked, you get false errors when checking maps in the editor.

I really think the editor and server should have separate types for these, in the same way as floors and floor masks are distinct.

The trees discussion was a red herring from the plasticine dog (good thing there are no fire hydrant arches... ). There's no question trees are scenery

Well yes, that is what I'm after here, the notmal, intended use. The actual type, whether it is blocksview 1 or not, and so on doesn't matter, except that those things indicate the intended use.

So what we want is a simple classification system, with the primary focus being ease of use for mappers. Ie, things are in an 'obvious' place and (except when you're doing something wierd)  you don't have to go digging all over the arches to find objects that 'go together'.

Which is relevant to where to put wall masks. On the whole I agree with you and Grumpy that they go in scenery, but:

(Obviously.)

scenery/cavewalls contains actual walls and four stalactites/stalagmites. Do we classify these four as walls and keep it all together in walls/ or classify them as scenery and divide cavewall/ between walls/ and scenery/? (I vote for the latter).

scenery/cave contains  a load of wallmasks (although wrong type and layer ATM), some rocks, and some pillars. Assuming that yes,wallmasks go in scenery/ not walls/, IMO all of this is scenery though I am not sure it should be all together in a cave/ subdir.

Lets see here...

For the specifics:
-I vote for the latter, for sure. There are parts of that "cave_deco" set that are definitely walls and that are definitely scenery.
-First, these wallmasks are odd. They are anomalies. That aside, i'd probably be tempted to put them in with the cave decorations in the cave subdir because 1) other wallmasks don't work well on the cave walls anyway, 2) these cave wallmasks aren't placed on the walls like normal wallmasks are, and 3) I personally view them as cave scenery... so that's where i'd look

I could easily go through things and come up with their "normal" use if you'd like. Heck, get me and another mapper from the B4 mapping chat (or you and me) to have a convo on it and we should have a pretty solid arrangement.

So, what would you have me do?

Cheers,
Unislash

No more than you're doing now -- I just need a bit of input from mappers who aren't me.

Anyway, so wallmasks as scenery (forget about the cave 'wallmasks' not being proper wallmasks anyway, although you're right, they aren't, but that just makke them even more appropriate for scenery).

How about floormasks? Same question, floors/ or scenery/? Now floormasks are a particular type, and a pretty special type at that (they aren't real objects) which suggests to put them in floors/.

But OTOH if wallmasks are in scenery, perhaps it makes sense for floormasks to also be in scenery/? I think this argument is strengthened when you look at something like scenery/blood/. This contains both wmasks and fmasks. It would be annoying to have those arches split between scenery/ and floors/.

EDIT: Another idea. scenery/ seems a bit of an odd place for floor and wall masks in general. Perhaps a dedicated top-level directory, masks/, which contains both. So we have floors/ for actual floors, walls/ for walls, windows, doors, and doorways, masks/ for fmasks and wmasks, and scenery/ for scenery (ie, inactive objects that just make the map look pretty/work).

I was just going to suggest that, smacky .

Of course, be aware that you don't the scenery folder to be too large, as it's a pain to go through the whole folder. I personally liked the indoor (scenery) and outdoor (scenery) folders, as it split things up into two. You did get the odd arch that could go into both... but the mapper gets used to it.

Cheers,
Unislash