Maps

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fernao
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Maps

#1 Post by fernao » Sun Jun 16, 2013 6:34 am

Added a Maps Section to the Wiki and uploaded my Map on Forostar.

http://wiki.geas.de/bin/view/Main/GeasMaps
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ferranifer
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Re: Maps

#2 Post by ferranifer » Mon Jun 17, 2013 7:29 pm

Very nice maps Fernao, nicely done. What software did you use to build them if I may ask?

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Re: Maps

#3 Post by fernao » Tue Jun 18, 2013 3:43 am

I use LibreOffice/OpenOffice Calc, thats a free MS Excel Clone.
For the mapping I simply define the field height and width to be identical, e.g. 0.5 cm, and then use the boundary format to "draw" the exits.
For pdf export I switch the grid lines to make them invisible.
And I also use the comment function to add reminders for myself to certain exits to remind myself how to enter special areas or what can be found where, such as special items or herbs. But such info should not just be given away, it should be explored by anyone by him- or herself, hence I removed it prior to pdf export.

Am glad someone likes it.
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Brom
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Re: Maps

#4 Post by Brom » Sat Jun 22, 2013 4:42 pm

Nice maps! Will be definitely useful for newbies!

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Re: Maps

#5 Post by marika » Sun Aug 04, 2013 5:22 am

Hmm. The map of Ormian doesn't seem to be right... I mean the southern caldera region. Perhaps it was changed? Or maybe it's one of those regions where you get your directions wrong? But I've never noticed anything like that...

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Sairina
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Re: Maps

#6 Post by Sairina » Sat Jan 04, 2014 8:52 pm

I compared my Ormian map with Fernao's and I think it's mostly the same, the caldera area is missing one deadend room and one or two of the exits in the forest are off, but they're minor things. I don't know if anything was changed, but it's definitely not an area where you confuse your directions - I think it's just that this particular area might look a bit confusing if mapped with just the directions rather than squares for rooms, because you'll have to look close sometimes to tell crossing exits (half distance) from meeting ones (I got confused by that at first).

I wonder what map information is OK to upload on the wiki (obviously no hidden areas). I have several maps, but they are pretty detailed (aside from upward exits marked as arrows I tend to colour-code the area type (forest, meadow, mountain, etc.), and I mark drinkable water sources and dangerous places (like attacking creatures). The latter I could easily leave out for an upload, I add that in Photoshop anyway, but the colours would take a bit of work... they're not really _secret_ I guess, or would they be considered spoilers?

BTW Fernao, your Forostar map is fantastic!

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Re: Maps

#7 Post by Sairina » Tue Jan 07, 2014 5:13 am

I've added my map of Elvandar city to the wiki page, I hope that's OK?

It's a pity that there's not more maps on the Geas website, they would be helpful to make potential new players curious about the world I think...
Last edited by Sairina on Tue Jan 07, 2014 9:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

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tanriel
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Re: Maps

#8 Post by tanriel » Tue Jan 07, 2014 9:34 am

To the question about maps - the homepage is/was maintained by Abharsair as far as I know. Turian and Horwitz should have full access and could surely update if they could be made aware of that there are two maps (they possibly may not be aware that there are maps on the wiki).

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Re: Maps

#9 Post by ferranifer » Tue Jan 07, 2014 12:59 pm

Sairina wrote:I've added my map of Elvandar city to the wiki page, I hope that's OK?

It's a pity that there's not more maps on the Geas website, they would be helpful to make potential new players curious about the world I think...
Nice map! You used Argon for that, didn't you? How is it? I've been looking for a good MUD mapping tool and haven't really found any that I liked. Does Argon do diagonal exits now?

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Re: Maps

#10 Post by Sairina » Tue Jan 07, 2014 1:26 pm

Thanks! Yes, I've used Argon (with some editing in Photoshop, mainly to fit the upward exits into the layout), and it's the best mud mapper I've seen so far - I've only discovered it a couple of days ago, but I'm having a lot of fun with it - it does indeed do crossing diagonal exits (which my old mapper didn't do, so I had to add all of those in Photoshop - pain in the back that was...)

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Re: Maps

#11 Post by ferranifer » Wed Jan 08, 2014 1:05 pm

I played around with Argon a bit yesterday and it is indeed very powerful. I wish it handled map linking in a better way, but hey, it's a good alternative to grid paper ;) Your map looks pretty and informative though, lots of care put on the little details. Good job!

I've been thinking on implementing an automapper for Geas in Mudlet for a while. More than anything it's because it's handy to have the map in the actual Mud client, but if done right it could even do pathfinding, autowalking and all that jazz. I don't know if you're familiar with other MUDs, but especially the IRE MUDs have some pretty impressive map scripts and automapping support (namely GCMP data) that allow crafty scripters to produce pretty good maps. An example would be:

Image

Some other MUDs have a kind of ASCII "world map" kind of feature for those big outdoor areas. Geas has something like that for the ocean. It would be awesome to get that for the inland outdoor areas too! HINT! HINT! WIZARDS!. Mudlet can actually generate those maps out of its mapping data. Looks like this:

Image

In Geas it's a bit difficult to implement this kind of tool since you have to rely on game output text for it. The Geas engine isn't as sophisticated in this regard as some of the other engines out there. There is no GMCP or metadata support and it's not a trivial undertaking to add it to DGD. This makes identifying rooms uniquely quite difficult. It's not impossible though and if there is enough interest I can try to take that project up again.

So, anyone using Mudlet as game client? Anyone interested on an automapper module?

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Re: Maps

#12 Post by Aturshus » Thu Jan 09, 2014 12:49 am

I'm using Mudlet, yes. I have little need for a map, but it seems like a neat feature, and I do like neat features.

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Re: Maps

#13 Post by glorfindel » Thu Jan 09, 2014 5:15 am

Using mudlet myself, while I don't really use any map, I find it handy to help exploring areas that my brain has not yet mapped out (so they are not off the head like most of the mud) to i I don't miss any spots.

I've started some automapping script a while ago, it is indeed possible within geas by looking for the 'There are ... obvious exits" and playing with toggle line-length max so that stuff is actually one line for the mudlet parser to happen. I eventually got bored and did never finish and eventually purge the script (I think).

If somebody else would be willing to put some time in there, I sure can provide some advanced pointers as to how to get start with mudlet (I suggest some average coding skills at least though).

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Re: Maps

#14 Post by ferranifer » Thu Jan 09, 2014 7:17 am

Picking the exit is now easier with the new options for rendering the exit string (which I suggested to Turian precisely to make detection easier). The new roomshort option helps a ton as well.

The main issue I have is how to uniquely identify the room. Mudlet includes a way to generate unique IDs (or you could easily code it yourself), but you are always left with the problem of knowing if a room is new or not when you step into it. Other MUDs solve this problem by providing coordinates and an unique ID or room hash through a data layer like GMCP or MSDP (or as a render option for the room output). I personally like the hash better because it makes it harder for a human to know where he is in the world just by looking at the id/coordinates (imagine you get blindfolded and dumped in a cell somewhere). The problem is that adding these data to the mud output breaks player immersion (that's why the data layer was developed).

Anyways, I basically gave up on this when it started becoming clear that it was a lot of effort for what accounts to a mildly useful intellectual exercise. But I keep coming back to it and might end up producing something. In fact, I asked Turian recently to consider providing a way to obtain unique room ids in game ;)

Any pointers would be appreciated. My main issues were:
* Uniquely identifying where you are. Sadly we have a lot of wilderness rooms that have only minor differences in their long descs, or have random longs. Tundra for example is a nightmare. I wish the game had an inbuilt wilderness map for these large scale areas.
* Eastup/eastdown style exits. These add a unique flare to Geas but some days I wish these didn't exist. In fact my basic navigation set of scripts already change my interface with the game to get rid of this. (when I press my 'east' key on the keypad, it tries eastdown and eastup if it fails).
* Picking up the different parts of the room (room desc text format is far from reliable). I find it quite annoying for example that the short desc of the room is included in some longs. Or that there is no option to see both the short and the long at the same time on separate lines (maybe something that would be easy to add as a toggle option). Or that sometimes you get a "time of the day" string in front of the room desc.
* The Geas World is not on a fixed sized grid. This means you cannot rely on just geometry and distance to create the map graph, which exacerbates the issue with not having unique room ids.
* Darkness.

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Re: Maps

#15 Post by luminier » Thu Jan 09, 2014 1:43 pm

There is a reason for that first point you have there. The reason for that is because they use a template room for a whole bunch of rooms. This means that you write the description for one plains room and it is used for 30 different rooms and then you only have to change things like "and you see mountains to the <insert direction>". It's a stylistic choice to make coding a lot of rooms easier. Ever tried writing out 50 different room descriptions for a plains area? there is only so many things you can say.
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Re: Maps

#16 Post by fernao » Wed Sep 21, 2016 6:40 am

Hope these Links will survive a bit longer.
The Forostar Map:
https://dochub.com/carstennitschke/2Bew ... 2z8l3vrxt3
The Ormion Map:
https://dochub.com/carstennitschke/5YqP ... x22sr44mr9
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fernao
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Re: Maps

#17 Post by fernao » Wed Sep 21, 2016 6:54 am

Hmm... Seems that DocHub has problems with the quality.

Here the links to the files in my Dropbox.
Forostar:https://www.dropbox.com/s/220iunqa1jzl0 ... r.pdf?dl=0
Ormoion: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qdmnd77o1wz39 ... n.pdf?dl=0
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luminier
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Re: Maps

#18 Post by luminier » Wed Sep 21, 2016 5:00 pm

why not imgur?
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Re: Maps

#19 Post by fernao » Thu Sep 22, 2016 2:11 pm

The maps are pdf, not images. Don't think you can upload pdfs at imgur.
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Re: Maps

#20 Post by luminier » Thu Sep 22, 2016 3:18 pm

ah okay. i guess it doesn't matter now but out of morbid curiosity can you convert pdfs to image files and then upload then to imgur?
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