Cross Zone Travel

Cross-Zone Travel

Single-zone walking is handled by the Mapper — click a room and Genie walks you there. Travelling across zone boundaries needs more: a graph that spans multiple zone files plus the transit links (boats, ferries, climb-walls, portals) that connect them. Genie 5 has the pathfinder, the data format, and an editor for that graph.

Status: the transit graph, the multi-zone pathfinder, and the editor are in place. Feeding a full cross-zone route to the walker is the remaining piece (see What's left).

The transit graph

Cross-zone links live in a single ZoneConnections.xml at the root of your Maps folder, next to the Map##_*.xml zone files. Keeping them in one file lets the community Maps repo curate transit links without touching individual zone files.

Each connection is one directed link:

Field	Meaning
from-zone / to-zone	Zone-file basenames without .xml (e.g. Map01_Crossing).
from-room / to-room	A node id, or #serverRoomId.
verb	What the walker sends (board boat, climb wall).
transit-type	A free-form tag (boat, climb, ride, portal).
requires	A skill / class / level gate.
rt	Roundtime seconds.
wait-min / wait-max	Scheduled-departure wait window (for boats/ferries).
notes	Community notes.

<connections>
  <connection id="boat-cross-throne"
              from-zone="Map01_Crossing"  from-room="#37666999"
              to-zone="Map35_Throne_City" to-room="#37666500"
              verb="board boat" transit-type="boat"
              wait-min="300" wait-max="600"
              requires="" rt="0" notes="" />
</connections>

On first launch Genie seeds a documented starter template (example routes with placeholder room ids) so you have something to edit, and writes a marker so it never re-seeds — if you delete the file deliberately, Genie respects that. Connections that can't be resolved (stale zone/room refs) are simply skipped, so a half-filled file degrades gracefully to single-zone routing rather than breaking.

The pathfinder

The multi-zone pathfinder runs Dijkstra over a meta-graph of (zone, room) pairs, loading each zone lazily (read at most once per search). It draws edges from two sources:

• Intra-zone — each loaded zone's own room exits.
• Cross-zone — the ZoneConnections.xml links.

Both kinds are gated against your character's live skills, class, and level — an edge you can't take is excluded from the search entirely. Edge weights:

• intra-zone: 1 + RtCost/4
• cross-zone: 1 + RtCost/4 + averageWait/4

Wait time dominates, so a boat with a long schedule is only chosen when there's no overland route. The result is an ordered list of steps, each carrying its verb and — for cross-zone hops — the expected wait window and target zone.

Rooms can be referenced by integer node id or by DragonRealms server-room id (#NNNN); the pathfinder resolves both, preferring the server-room id since it survives map regeneration.

The editor

File → Cross-Zone Connections… opens a grid editor: add, remove, edit, and save connections. This is the curation surface for the transit graph the pathfinder consults. You can also let the community Maps repo ship richer versions over time — see Updating Maps & Scripts.

The walker's wait UI

The walker already understands cross-zone steps: when one carries a wait window, it shows a countdown ("~4:23 left") in the Mapper indicator strip while it waits for the destination zone's room to fingerprint in. So the presentation of a cross-zone hop is built.

What's left

1. Feed multi-zone plans to the walker — route through the multi-zone pathfinder when the destination is in a different zone, and translate its step list into the walk loop.
2. Cross-zone arrival detection — advance the walk when the destination zone's room becomes current (using the same fingerprinting + auto-load-zone the mapper already does).
3. A travel entry point — today a walk is started by clicking a room in the active zone; cross-zone travel needs a destination picker (or named-destination registry) that spans zones.

A note on scope

Genie 5 deliberately does not aim to absorb the entire community travel.cmd into the engine. Escape recipes for un-mappable starting rooms, premium-account shortcuts, and ferry-state recovery are well-suited to scripts and stay there. The engine targets the common land + scheduled-transit routes, with scripts remaining the fallback for the long tail.

Related

• The Mapper — single-zone tracking and walking.
• Updating Maps & Scripts — where ZoneConnections.xml and zone files come from.
• The developer design notes: multi-zone-travel.md, AUTOMAPPER_DESIGN.md.