Bodah Island might need to be looked at too. It has a those repeating room things which makes mapping it hard
There are about 5k rooms that have the same names. I was manually combining all duplicated room names into single lines until I got to 1.5k lines after four hours and gave up. I feel your pain.
Install python or lua or perl or some other scripting language. Read lines from a file and add them to an associative array, concatenating room numbers to the end of the values for each. Loop over your completed array and print them to a new file with the format you want.
I am the righteous one... the claims are stated - it's the world I've created
I'm honestly hoping that the Shaahri remains a desert you can get lost in. All I ever wanted was a clear path to Antioch, and if all these difficult to navigate areas are tamed, I might cry.
I'm honestly hoping that the Shaahri remains a desert you can get lost in. All I ever wanted was a clear path to Antioch, and if all these difficult to navigate areas are tamed, I might cry.
Rest assured, you can still get lost in the desert (assuming you don't know how to PATH FIND <anywhere>). Most of the changes involved removing unnecessary (to me at least) links between rooms, and an improved alignment of rooms in the... I think you could call it outer desert (i.e, not the rooms directly adjacent to the city)
Jeremy, do you use a program to visually the map and decide what to change? Or just wing it?
I used the in game mapper mainly. We are also working on a massive revamp of the html5 client mapper which I tested in. If it looks good in those two, it should look good in everything else.
On the note of the desert. We currently have a Shaahri desert area. I am thinking of creating a new Inner Shaahri desert area for the inner desert map. This means things would change for some skills and event things. Any problems with that?
I used the in game mapper mainly. We are also working on a massive revamp of the html5 client mapper which I tested in. If it looks good in those two, it should look good in everything else.
On the note of the desert. We currently have a Shaahri desert area. I am thinking of creating a new Inner Shaahri desert area for the inner desert map. This means things would change for some skills and event things. Any problems with that?
What skills? Mirage in Shielddance? have at it.
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>ass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
Well, if raiding were still a thing, it would certainly have an impact, namely, the area one should to be able to hit someone at the gates would be a lot more restricted. Or course, it goes the other way, people attacking raiders in the outer desert would have to completely leave the protection of their gates and siege.
The desert thing really comes down to how many things you want to put in the desert. The way it's set up now, there's several bashing areas(including one wave-style high tier) and such that directly connect off of the Shaahri, as well as almost all of Antioch's townes, save Tylaran.
If you want to make the desert a major hub, I think you should divide it into an Inner and Outer. If this is about as much as you want to put in it, it's fine as is.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
A lot of these overcomplicated, looping arrangements saved my life back when not everyone had a track to skill or used thirdeye and a map.
It wasn't easy to navigate, but the large number of possible paths gave you time to think.
So long as you can start at one end of an area and reach the other, I'm fine with it, but that's my problem with Antioch and the Shaahri. I can walk around for five minutes, circle three times, and not find the gate.
Mainly because of all those defunct "nearing the gate" rooms. Confusing.
So yeah, that can change. The way in should be clear and explicit.
If anyone downloaded the IMap before this post, redownload it. I forgot to remove something that very likely would make it impossible to parse by the standard IMapper module.
I have made several changes to the maps for Stavenn and Kinsarmar today, including breaking off their arenas into their own maps.
There were several rooms on those maps that were from other areas completely, I have no idea how they got on there.
As I am looking at cities, we will probably make some changes to get rid of some of these long lines of rooms that just look lame. Some of them make absolutely no sense in their descriptions. I know it is for defensive reasons, which is fine, but I would like to be able to allow for defense, and have non lame city layouts.
More on that later, too many other little project we are doing right now.
Another thing bothering me are the crisscrossing road rooms in Kinsarmar that do not line up. I am going to get an ent slave to get together with a city leader to clean that up some.
Al'drym is a miserable area that needs changed because of the huge circle-related bonus it has in the way that Demonic doesn't get thrown around like the other two.
If there's 8 AM fighters and 8 Magick fighters on for a shardfall in Al'drym, nothing goes down because both sides say "You know, forget that place, Stavenn can take this one."
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Al'drym is a miserable area that needs changed because of the huge circle-related bonus it has in the way that Demonic doesn't get thrown around like the other two.
If there's 8 AM fighters and 8 Magick fighters on for a shardfall in Al'drym, nothing goes down because both sides say "You know, forget that place, Stavenn can take this one."
We're working on a few changes to this area. Feel free to email isra@imperian.com if you have beef or ideas!
1. Let me say that what I'm pointing out here is largely moot. We're all using either the HTML mapper or some off-client mapper. So this is just for those weird people like me who haven't got on with the times.
2. I know this is a good deal of work. So I'm not too urgent about it.
I've thrown around the idea for a long time now that there is an art to building rooms. That there are rules you can apply that give the room meaning, that suggest purpose, and can increase ease of play.
For instance, a road with variable exits is not a road at all. The player cannot reliably determine which direction is the right one to keep on a road, so people keep stepping off the road, keep backtracking, get frustrated, and just choose not to use the road.
This is because the road did not portray clear, discernible paths, which contradicts the notion of a road being easy travel.
This brings me to a trend in many of the new areas since I've returned to the game. Here's a snippet from the Mavitt Woods :
I'll admit, I love complex maps. They give you plenty of places to hide, plenty of room to explore, and plenty of fun running through. However, you must distinguish different parts of the map. There must be sections, with clear boundaries between them.
From the MAP data, you might think you see that here, and if you only look at the bird's eye view of the MAP data, you'd be correct. If you build your MUD with this point of view in mind, then it is the only one players will ever be able to use.
However, from the old-timey just moving room to room without graphics, those two areas are not differentiated. You go from one room with three exits to another with four, and you don't really see the connection between two distinct areas. This greatly disrupts the mental map a player creates as they move through the world, and it makes things like CONFIG MAPVIEW essential for navigating.
The only thing I can suggest as a remedy for this is to use, "gateway," rooms as you move from one section of an area to another, so players can readily perceive the transition.
From this, you can still have complexity in your map without being confusing to the player.
Comments
Install python or lua or perl or some other scripting language. Read lines from a file and add them to an associative array, concatenating room numbers to the end of the values for each. Loop over your completed array and print them to a new file with the format you want.
the claims are stated - it's the world I've created
Jeremy, do you use a program to visually the map and decide what to change? Or just wing it?
Nowadays, I don't really think it would matter.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
It wasn't easy to navigate, but the large number of possible paths gave you time to think.
So long as you can start at one end of an area and reach the other, I'm fine with it, but that's my problem with Antioch and the Shaahri. I can walk around for five minutes, circle three times, and not find the gate.
Mainly because of all those defunct "nearing the gate" rooms. Confusing.
So yeah, that can change. The way in should be clear and explicit.
the claims are stated - it's the world I've created
Al'drym is a miserable area that needs changed because of the huge circle-related bonus it has in the way that Demonic doesn't get thrown around like the other two.
If there's 8 AM fighters and 8 Magick fighters on for a shardfall in Al'drym, nothing goes down because both sides say "You know, forget that place, Stavenn can take this one."
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
2. I know this is a good deal of work. So I'm not too urgent about it.
I've thrown around the idea for a long time now that there is an art to building rooms. That there are rules you can apply that give the room meaning, that suggest purpose, and can increase ease of play.
For instance, a road with variable exits is not a road at all. The player cannot reliably determine which direction is the right one to keep on a road, so people keep stepping off the road, keep backtracking, get frustrated, and just choose not to use the road.
This is because the road did not portray clear, discernible paths, which contradicts the notion of a road being easy travel.
This brings me to a trend in many of the new areas since I've returned to the game. Here's a snippet from the Mavitt Woods :
---------- v24480 -----------
\ |
\ | [ ]-[ ]
\ | / |
\ | [ ]-[ ]
\ | / | \
- - - - -[ ]-[ ] [ ]-[ ]
/ \ | | /
/ [+] [ ]
/ | \ /
/ [ ]-[ ]-[ ]
/ | / \ |
[ ] [ ]-[ ]
|
[ ]
/
---------- 12:-4:0 ----------
I'll admit, I love complex maps. They give you plenty of places to hide, plenty of room to explore, and plenty of fun running through. However, you must distinguish different parts of the map. There must be sections, with clear boundaries between them.
From the MAP data, you might think you see that here, and if you only look at the bird's eye view of the MAP data, you'd be correct. If you build your MUD with this point of view in mind, then it is the only one players will ever be able to use.
However, from the old-timey just moving room to room without graphics, those two areas are not differentiated. You go from one room with three exits to another with four, and you don't really see the connection between two distinct areas. This greatly disrupts the mental map a player creates as they move through the world, and it makes things like CONFIG MAPVIEW essential for navigating.
The only thing I can suggest as a remedy for this is to use, "gateway," rooms as you move from one section of an area to another, so players can readily perceive the transition.
From this, you can still have complexity in your map without being confusing to the player.