Background, for use case: I'm working on an (almost/effectively) infinite map scrolling set-up for a survival crafting game with a mutable world, like a top-down Minecraft or Terraria. My current solution for visually joining the map chunks together involves using vis_contents - each chunk is held in the center of a z level that is surrounded by a buffer zone which uses vis_contents to show the turfs and their contents of the corresponding tile the next map over. Anything that tries to move into the buffer zone has its movement redirected to the tile being so mirrored.

The problem is that when an object moves across the boundary from "properly in the same map chunk" to "in a different map chunk but still visible", there's no gliding visible for that first step across the boundary, even though on screen it is apparently just moving from one tile to the next.

I would propose to fix this by having the client animate movement if a movable object goes from being drawn in one tile to being drawn in an adjacent tile, whether it's in contents or vis_contents.

I would hazard that for most use cases, this would be the desired behavior, and it could perhaps be controlled using an appearance flag for the corner cases where it would not be.

I'm sure there are workarounds but all the ones I can think of involve ditching vis_contents in favor of essentially faking vis_contents by creating objs to reflect any atom that exists in the buffer zone, which is exactly the kind of cumbersome solution that vis_contents seems designed to obviate?

Apologies if this has been requested before. I know I've seen discussion of other vis_contents gliding improvements be met with the response "not feasible" but I couldn't find one dealing with this, so I'm prepared for that to be the response here. On the other hand I know that vis_contents allows for gliding when moving between turfs in the same vis_contents and I'm hoping this case is more like that.