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Re: [Adonthell-devel] More v0.4 design issues


From: Kai Sterker
Subject: Re: [Adonthell-devel] More v0.4 design issues
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 11:35:00 +0100 (CET)

On Sun, 09 Dec 2001 23:34:07 +0000 cirrus wrote

> How about this as an idea:
> It might make sense to not split the map into equal sized squares - you
> could get problems like what happens if you have mapobjects that overlap
> from one map to the next?

Overlapping objects would be the biggest problem, I guess. The easiest
solution would be to not allow them at all. I don't know how big a
restriction this will be. But I guess we could live with it.

Another solution would be to (automatically) split overlapping objects,
but I guess that requires a lot more work. 

Maybe Alex can think of something nice.


> Presumably those mapobjects would need to be
> loaded for both maps although they are not fully displayed on either of
> them. 

Not really. Maps would share all objects, so this is not a huge problem.
However, I'm not sure if the mapengine can handle such "half" objects at
all. 


> How about letting map designers split the maps themselves.
> Obviously they'd have to make sure that the maps still fit together
> nicely without any gaps but that shouldn't be too diffcult.

Well, Alex has to answer this (as he'll have to code it), but in general
irregular maps would be much harder to handle. For example, a map no 
longer has exactly 1 adjacent map on each side. 

As for the naming, I guess you wouldn't have to name them at all. The
designer would work at a single world map and would hardly notice that
stuff is split up by the editor.


> Also, if
> several mapdesigners are working on maps of different locations they
> don't need to know the exact distance between the two maps which they
> presumably would need to know if everything had unique coordinates.

Well, that is something that speaks against global coordinates. However,
each map could be saved with local coordinates. At load time, they could
be easily converted to global ones. That way it wouldn't matter where a
single map will be placed in the end.

Of course there had to be a way to put the work of different designers 
together. Writing a tool to do that shouldn't be a huge problem though.
I would imagine something like this

    mapmerge <newmap.file> <size> <map1> <pos1> <map2> <pos2> ...
    (e.g. mapmerge complete.map 40 40 a.map 0 0 b.map 20 0)

Then you could load the new map in the mapeditor and make sure that they
fit well together (or fill in the space between them).

With such a tool, you could possibly even merge two or more worldmaps 
that all use global coordinates. You simply had to offset them with
their new positon during the merge process.


> All you'd need to do is specify what the next map is for each edge on a
> map.

With regular, computer controlled maps, you could simply calculate the map
name (and therefore the maps to load when nearing the edge) from the 
coordinates of that map. That would be less work for the designer.

In general, I think letting the computer handle this will be more convenient
for designers. If it's done properly they wouldn't even notice that the
world is split into different maps :). As I said, you wouldn't edit a
single map, but the complete world. So you have no problem to make
everything fit together. If you had to edit each map on it's own, and each
map could have a different size - well, I wouldn't want to be the person
that has to puzzle them together afterwards ;).

Kai





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