Ingame Map/Fast Travel

[DarkSavant13]

I'm suprised that I did a search and found absolutely nothing on this. O_o I propose an Ingame map with a "fog of war". What this means is that if you haven't been to a part of the map yet, it is blocked from your view by a:"fog". This encourages exploration and gives you a map to see where you've been.

I also suggest the map have important points like towns labeled and to allow map modification in the form of user created labels, icons or colored pins. This map would definitely need a zoom function and the map's graphics must be clear and nice.

It would also be nice to be able to "quick travel" from town to town as you discover them. One way to do this is to have the player rent a coach for 100 gold per trip (or something like that) as the coach, horses, and protection are expensive. You could even have towns they refuse to go to if you like.

Later in their adventures, say a certain adventure level, the player could even get a quest for a traveling stone, a magical stone of teleportation that does the same job as the coach but takes something to use, say rubies for instance. The big difference is that this stone can be used anywhere outside, just select and choose from a list of already visited locations. You could even forgo the coach and use the stone from early on if ya like.

The main thing would to be at least getting a working ingame map, though. This game is sorely lacking without one, even though I still love it.

DarkSavant13

[nyktos]

Welcome to the forum!!!



some posts Oskar has recently made about maps...

Hello hblok, welcome to the forums!

Sorry for the extremely late update on this. I should have commented on this ages ago when you posted it.

Wow, nice work!

This looks like a really neat application, and really something that could be useful as a stand-alone tool for the game. The worldmap we will have in-game will require a whole different approach, to not consume as much memory, since our aim is at around 16MB(!) allocated memory on the device. But as a stand-alone tool, this is really interesting. For example, for the upcoming worldmap I think we'll need to assign something like "world-coordinates" to each map, to make the process of stitching them together a bit more efficient, and a tool like this could really help with that!

It may not be as obvious, but we have an early version of a sort of world-map in a tmx-file that we use when developing new maps, to remember the names of each map:
http://code.google.com/p/andors-trail/s ... ld_map.tmx
Maybe this tool can be adapted into generating such a map automatically? Could be really nice, and would save a lot of work in maintaining that file.

I should also add that your idea of a javascript/html5 worldmap sounds really interesting. If you are interested in continuing on that, and want to get over the zlib compression obstacle, I have heard that the "jsxcompressor" library can do zlib and deflate decompression in pure javascript:
http://jsxgraph.uni-bayreuth.de/wp/jsxcompressor/

Again, nice work! Looking forward to seeing what we can make of this!

Hi again,

about the world-map, we recently added a <property> to the <map> element, that sets "outside"="1" for all maps that we consider to be outside. The thought for that was that all maps that have "outside"="1" should be rendered on the worldmap, which in effect would exclude all indoor maps. Maybe we'll have to tweak that for some special maps that are connected through cave systems, to consider them indoors even though they are outside (for example, "wild14_clearing.tmx").

And about Blackwater mountain, I would really like to have them on a separate worldmap and not show up on the main outdoor worldmap since they overlap with what we have planned for the road to Carn Tower. Maybe something like a larger map of a whole dungeon, but used for the whole of BWM even though they are outdoors? It might be possible to encode this in the <property> tags of each maps. Maybe one property stating which "overview map" they belong to, and one property stating the map's relative coordinates on that particular overview map, with one of the overview maps being the actual outdoors world map.

My general though for a world-map in-game is that we generate down-scaled png files that we store on the sd-card for each map that the player visits, and then create a html fragment that links all these png files together with absolute positioning. That way, we can make use of a html view that all Android devices have, which would have the benefit of giving pinch-to-zoom and all those nice features that Android users are accustomed to, without having to code it ourselves.

a link to a really rough map, for anyone who may be interested...
http://www.iostr.com/andorstrail_worldmap.png

some more in a min...



- - - EDIT - - -

not much, but a little more...



"fog of war" - this came up on the code page & i agree...
im pretty sure this is how the map will end up. but haven't asked...

and as for fast travel, there are a couple good threads with nice ideas...
just hasn't gotten much attention yet.

i am hoping that the next version - v0.6.12 will have a map!
(just gotta wait & see though)

take care!!!


always great to have new members!

[DarkSavant13]

Thanks, nyktos.

[lady black]

I am also surprised that you found nothing on maps, because there has been a fair amount of talk amout them and several player-created versions of the world map through the current official version. (Not including the latest. just-released alpha.}
But then, I have never used the search, and there has been talk that it could work better.
Why fog of war? Of course you don't know what a place is like until you have been there. But why of war? Why not fog of the unknown? Fog of mystery? Fog of uncertainty? Fog of beyond? Must have been named by a male.

[nyktos]

Thanks, nyktos.

any time!!!
that's why we're here!



[anything else, just ask - i'm sure you know how great our community is!]

btw, love the Av!

But then, I have never used the search, and there has been talk that it could work better.

sdevaney recently beefed up our search, and the old tips still work well...
(at the cost making it impossible for non-members to use it)
a hefty price for power, but i think it was a wise move.

Place + in front of a word which must be found and - in front of a word which must not be found.
Put a list of words separated by | into brackets if only one of the words must be found.
Use * as a wildcard for partial matches.

Why fog of war? Of course you don't know what a place is like until you have been there. But why of war? Why not fog of the unknown? Fog of mystery? Fog of uncertainty? Fog of beyond? Must have been named by a male.

i'm pretty sure it's because it was first used in war & conquest games (to hide enemy movement & such...)
dungeon crawlers and adventure / rpgs adopted them later...

but your point is still valid!

[DarkSavant13]

I am also surprised that you found nothing on maps, because there has been a fair amount of talk amout them and several player-created versions of the world map through the current official version. (Not including the latest. just-released alpha.}
But then, I have never used the search, and there has been talk that it could work better.
Why fog of war? Of course you don't know what a place is like until you have been there. But why of war? Why not fog of the unknown? Fog of mystery? Fog of uncertainty? Fog of beyond? Must have been named by a male.

Actually, it WAS created by a male, Carl von Clausewitz to describe the unknown of war. The first use of it in a video game was in Tanktics created by Chris Crawford in 1978, another male.

The search I did was for "ingame map" (no parantheses). I figured the search would definitely turn up something whether for ingame or map, but nada.

DarkSavant13

[Antison]

Why fog of war? Of course you don't know what a place is like until you have been there. But why of war? Why not fog of the unknown? Fog of mystery? Fog of uncertainty? Fog of beyond? Must have been named by a male.

Excellent point to say the least. This is the kind of analytical question I would ask. I love this kind of thinking/questioning. +1 to lady black

[Pyrizzle]

Great idea, the Fog of war (or whatever we would call it) would be great for exploring and finding new areas you havent been to yet.

[DarkSavant13]

We could always call it "The Fog of Shadow".

[fiernaq]

I always wondered what The Shadow was.... now I know

The Shadow refers to the unknown of the world... no wonder people think it's a deity.