For the curious, the colored terrain regions are direct output from our overland wilderness code. The graphic file without all the labels and red dots and such is literal game data.
I have conceived of a way to take my mudrooms data and generate a really simple ascii map by assigning coordinates of *'s, X's and such in a giant rectangle. But I have no idea how would one go about taking the same room data and creating a smooth-lined picture out of it. Could you please give some details about how you accomplished this?
Detah@Arcania
It's not as hard as you'd think Detah! You'll need the gdlib to do it, so make sure the server you're on has it. Then glance around the net to find code for it (I'm pretty sure it comes with the stock overland code). With the lib, not only can you auto-generate the image, but you can also read the image. I used the gdlib to allow my MUD to read a png file and load up the world based on it. So I could draw my wilderness and then let the MUD build all the rooms for me.
We've got a filterable, automatically generated map with color-coded objectives and warps. It really is necessary for our kind of game, where the entire thing is played on a 3D coordinate-based plane. You really need to be able to see the big picture.
That's pretty cool Kelvin! IIRC, you also set it up so players could have their stats in a banner, and it'd auto update them as they advanced! I thought that was really cool.
mmmm I am jelous wish I could show off my own map now but its kinda hanging on my wall *sighs* I wounder if I still have that 1 pice left that I spent a month on lol I am not a fast artist sadly I will look for it though see if I can dig it up
Our map started out with a player making us the nice "plain" green/blue one and then Dragona freehand copied it to a bunch of sheets of printer paper that we thumbtacked to a 4'x5' cork board that still sits between our desks with push pins holding "flags" in place for each of our areas. The color coded version that Hades used to prettify the "plain" one was again Dragona freehand re-drawing the map onto a single piece of printer paper on a clipboard that she used colored pencils to indicate roughly what terrain went where for building reference. Then I took a picture of these various versions of the map (that weren't on the computer to begin with) using my digital camera and imported the images to my hard drive, the rest of what you see if Hades' own magic. :biggrin:
Kelvin said:
Conner said:
That's pretty cool, Kelvin, and you say it's automatically generated??
Yeah, it's surprisingly simple. Our map format is pretty easy to parse. For example, here's the map file that's running our current scenario. The objectives are pulled from SQL, which the game populates.
That really is amazing. Not as pretty and slick as what Hades just made for us, of course :wink:, but for completely auto-generated that's really nice. And the fact that you've got it auto-generating is pretty cool in itself. :blues:
Davion said:
Kelvin said:
We've got a filterable, automatically generated map with color-coded objectives and warps. It really is necessary for our kind of game, where the entire thing is played on a 3D coordinate-based plane. You really need to be able to see the big picture.
That's pretty cool Kelvin! IIRC, you also set it up so players could have their stats in a banner, and it'd auto update them as they advanced! I thought that was really cool.
Kelvin said:
Yeah, forum banner sigs, which are also pretty easy to do:
Wow, that's pretty slick too! I'll bet your players love that. :smile: It's kind of like the baby birthday tickers that Dragona likes to use, I suppose…
Anyone has some useful tips on how to turn a ascii world map into a bitmap image?
Assuming your ascii map is loaded into game memory, you could write a routine to save it as a bitmap or png, then load the mud and let it read the ascii and then save it as an image. Outside of that I don't know of any utilities or anything that would be able to do it properly.
Here is our world map which shows real time movement of our players, what areas they are in, if they are grouped or not and with who, and our boat paths between our islands and continents:
Here is our world map which shows real time movement of our players, what areas they are in, if they are grouped or not and with who, and our boat paths between our islands and continents:
Here's a first look at my map. It's the prototype for my mud. Legends of Old. If Hades Kane would want to put his creativity on it that'd be grand, but if not then that's fine as well. Figure it is worth a try :). The black dots represent cities/villages. The bigger the dot the bigger the city.
I have conceived of a way to take my mudrooms data and generate a really simple ascii map by assigning coordinates of *'s, X's and such in a giant rectangle. But I have no idea how would one go about taking the same room data and creating a smooth-lined picture out of it. Could you please give some details about how you accomplished this?
Detah@Arcania
It's not as hard as you'd think Detah! You'll need the gdlib to do it, so make sure the server you're on has it. Then glance around the net to find code for it (I'm pretty sure it comes with the stock overland code). With the lib, not only can you auto-generate the image, but you can also read the image. I used the gdlib to allow my MUD to read a png file and load up the world based on it. So I could draw my wilderness and then let the MUD build all the rooms for me.