Some thoughts on Channelwood. Here is the revized map so far:

http://www.geocities.com/timfe...hannelwood_map02.png

According to old assignments, Michael's hut is hut 8. But my coworker Rick, who is thinking of joining, made a good point about the current map: some of the huts are designed such that you have to go THROUGH a hut in order to get to another spot. I fully intended for Channelwood to be almost EXACTLY like the Channelwood of the game MYST, save for broken floorboards and stuff. I thought up a few solutions to this:

The huts that double as intersections could have 2 floors to them so that the bottum floor is for traffic while the upper floor is for living space. Rick's thought was that the path could be built to go around the huts (like we see for hut 2 on level 3). Finally, the last option is to just have it like it already was with just one floor and the people have to pass through the intersection huts in order to get to other places. Whatever the case, I think it makes TOTAL sense that Michael's hut is hut 8 since he's the second in command and you can see he's right dead center of town so anyone and everyone could potentially go to him with ease. He's Katy's coordinater, having just as much (if not more) of a hand in the pulse of the people as Katy.

When I looked in the game MYST itself and noticed there are actual boards around hut 8, though there isn't a railing to protect you from falling. So for hut 8, we can easily say it has a railing and a path around the hut. Problem solved there. I'll explore Channelwood some more, but I think this and the other solutions mentioned above should work.

But I am revising the maps so as to get rid of names that no longer exsist (Such as Razorwind) as well as adding names that were not there such as the School where Michael, Emerald, Jimmy, Ricky (The historian character my coworker Rick is working on.) or Valin might teach since they are the older folks of Channelwood.

There also needs to be reasons why certain people live in certain huts. Like in the case of why Michael would be in the center of town. Katy having a hut on the third floor makes sense so that she can see the entire town all at once just by looking down at it from above.

I'm making hut 2 the school so that the children can be evacuated via the stairs quickly (Stairs being RIGHT next to hut 2). I still think hut 9 is best for the Mess Hall, but I'm open to suggestions. That said, I now have a lot of blank slates to fill. So come and claim! I didn't see a "Matt's hut" or anything, so Joe needs to pick his hutt. Valin needs to pick a hut. I'm guessing the children would share 3 or 4 huts sorted by age and gender. Lemme know what you guys think. I'm doing this to make sense out of our little community in Channelwood and to figure out just HOW crowded the place is.

Oh yeah... and I figure some obvious stuff like the pond surrounding the windmill would be used for bathing purposes and such. I almost took the mundane for granted, so don't lemme forget that stuff.

Finally, I figure there would be one or two adults in each of the children's communal huts (Huts 4 and 5) who would probably switch with other adults. Each hut should comfortabley house as many as 8 people if using bunk-beds (Though the number could potentially shoot to 12 per hut if the bunks have a third level). Come to think of it, I suppose this means no one freedom fighter would have a hut all to themselves (Which, in all fairness, has me questioning who would share Katy's hut). So should I call it "Officer's Hut" instead? Also, there would be night watchers, so there is the potential that Channelwood could even have 4 or so more people than the huts allow for since someone using a hut for sleep at night would exchange it to the nightwatchers for sleep during the day.

Aquarius is getting an almost COMPLETELY new look, though it's basic appearance will stay the same. So I'll be discussing Aquarius next.

Hmm I'd say there would be a few people who have their own huts, but most would be communal living, people with there own huts would be people who work and live in the same place. For example, in Knothole, Rotor's workshop could easily double as his home/hut, and might do so since Rotor is never shown having a seperate hut he lives in, and it does look like his workshop was built to expand a normal hut.

I've also always thought that instead of traveling through the huts, one would travel around them via rail protected walkways and bridges, just like Rick had suggested. It is also quite likely that Channelwood has expanded beyond the limits of what the channelwood in the game which could have easily served as its original shape as it isn't hard to expand outwards and/or upwards if needed. The forests on Mobius are on average no doubt very dense, which is why robots haven't been able to map them out and find hidden villages like Knothole or Channelwood or Aquarius, which I suspect both are of similar size, although while Knothole and Aquarius were built to be able to handle a descent sized community from the start, Channelwood probably wasn't so, it is more of a patchwork design but can easily have grown to be around as large. But ya using the Channelwood from MYST as the base for what Channelwood started out as and expanding it in size to handle the larger population as it grew rapidly to accomodate people that gathered after being forced to flee Middletown. And now with more people coming to Channelwood, they would probably need to build a few new huts for them anyways.

  Errr, I don't know. 12 maybe?  Which one of the blank huts would be most likely to have been in a state of unused disrepair for whatever reasons?  For some reason get the mental image of Joe fixing it up during his 'I was here for a week, and nobody noticed?' situation.

  Few things are probably as safety precaution 'oops?' than noticing after a mission you've never seen that guy who went with you before.