HEY HEY JAY RAY #1: World Maps

[JayRay]

Hey Hey Jay Ray!
World Maps
by John Timmons (1/23/15)

How do you like to move around your maps? If you remember as a kid, playing those old-school RPGs there was the Zelda/Willow way, which basically had all the maps interconnected, and if you wanted to get from town to castle, you actually had to go from map to map to map. Then, games like Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior and others came along, where the continent, island, even the entire world was able to be traveled on, as long as one was ready for the intermittent ambush.

Once 3d games started coming out, more and more reference to the WORLD map showed up, from the world maps of Final Fantasy to the expansive terrain of games like WoW and Elder Scrolls games. Your world became your living map, where you had just as much of a chance for a quest and exploration in the outside world, as you did in the dark dungeon or abandoned castle.

In my project, 'Heroes of Roguehaven', while I still would like to have those map to map traverse, I also like the idea of long distance world travel, with the chances of running into so random monster along the way, or even finding secret dungeons or castles off the beaten path!

What I've proposed is to treat each country or region like a large map, with dozens of locations as events buried in each map. Passability would be limited to land and areas, and depending on an editor-capable 'terrain tag' I think a world map could relate for up to 8 different terrain types. Some might change player speed while on them (Forests, rocky areas) while others might slowly damage players, and others even heal them. Still others might inflict certain states on players, and even others might increase the chances for random encounters, or random treasure! Events in each area are triggered based on either a location switch being turned on, or, if they're just the random side-quest, these events might pop up if a player comes within 1 or 2 tiles from that location.


Once a player moves from region to region, new locations would become available, basically treating each 'Region Map' just like a regular map, but on a much larger scale.

I had originally thought to have the entire world just be freely available, but then realized it might not be good for our adventurous knight at level 5 to stumble on that level 80 castle, and dive right in... (Albeit a very humerous death that is much like some of my own deaths in table-top RPGs.)

Then I thought if I should use actual autotiles and tilesets for the world map, or if I should use a pre-configured map like the World Atlases by Cosmic Kitty and Olivia. While I like the idea of mapping a large and expansive map, the parallaxing mapping possibilities appear to be more tailored to my needs so I will probably go that route.

So, what do you all think? How will YOUR world shape up? As always, feedback definitely welcomed

(Next Week - Who needs Sleep? The perils of INNS)

[yamina-chan]

As I said before, all types have advantages and dissadvantages.
I don't think I'd be able to pick a favourite, as I have seen various types in various games that all work well in the context of said game. There's no way I could decide for one to be surperior above all others.
(Blame this on my redmage nature, if you will, but I don't think that's the case this time.)
It needs to match the tone of the game. If that tone is set for an open world with countless choices, so be it. If that tone is set for a predefined path, so be it.
There is no need for an entire worldmap, if the game takes place in just a small town. Likewise, if your goal is to save the planet, there needs to be more to it then the two NPC villages and those eleven dungeons.

[DerVVulfman]

Saying that there is a singular world map in a Bethesda Soft's 'Elder Scrolls' game is understandable, but actually a misnomer. In fact, it is very much like your regional map concept where the player crosses one map border to enter another, except they did it brilliantly so you wouldn't see the borders. They must use a form of buffering, loading the map data of the one the player is approaching, just to begin rendering. I can't help seeing 'loading map' once and a while.

Actually, you COULD do that with any RPGMaker (or virtually any other) map editor, just by duplicating sufficient sides of one map into another and use a teleport system in a way the player would not be aware.

Code:

As the player walks to
the east edge of the map....
------------------------+       +------------------------
         *      ^   ,   |       |  *      ^   ,
                        |       |
              .     -->X|       |        .       (X)
                        |       |
                        |       |
                  *     |       |           *    
         . .            |       |  . .            
------------------------+       +------------------------
                                He is teleported to the
                                right edge of another
                                with the same edge contents.

Of course, this is being simplistic for an example, and you would want to use a much better form of teleport control so the player not only goes to the next map, but a location based on his previous X/Y position on the previous. AND the person playing the game may notice the player character suddenly refreshed... his movement pattern resetting... unless that too is handled.

[Ahzoh]

I like DerVV's idea... I want to do something like that...

[Taylor]

I actually experimented with that idea a bit with Pokemon style maps - the surrounding edges of other maps would be located to create the appearance of seamless transitions. Then later that "starter" kit came along and actually stitched the maps together. I always had lagging issues with that though (but that might've been my computer + RMXP crap), I'm pretty sure it was meant to be efficient... even if it overall is kind of terrible.

I'm personally fond of the way Chrono Trigger and Cross did things. I like both world maps and close-scale(?) travel too. The Chrono games treated their world maps a bit more like menus - there were no encounters, many locations, and some could be walked through (like valleys) after completing that location's dungeon.

For my own project though the "world map" really is just a menu, like how Persona or Lost Odyssey do it. In my own case it's because the larger game world is interplanetary, while on-world travel is/will probably be all in-location, close-scale stuff. I could save a lot of concern about how to handle "overworld" maps by having on-world location menus as well, but then I wouldn't have the ability to,er, show off the worlds.