Greetings,

I have long been an opponet to overland/wildnerness code in muds, cause I don't like the look of it. Now, I am
thinking of reconsidering this original opinion, if I find something I like. What is the best overland/wilderness code games you guys have seen, and if you know of any please post examples of what they look like.

Thanks,

Vladaar

Maybe there is no answer to my question, cause overland/wilderness is based on artistic ability of who makes the maps?

I guess I was thinking there was different codes out there, that one looked heaps better then the other, but if it's a matter
of how well you make your maps, I guess any overland code will do, and can be customized to your mud. I have been
looking for screen shots of overland/wilderness code, and very few muds have them. I think Materia Magica was one that
I found a few shots of overland.

Vladaar

Bah, no one'd mentioned a code thief around here for a while…now you blew it.

Please forgive me for being a little screenshot happy, I planned on only taking a couple but it turned into a bunch.

http://carnival.slayn.net/images/screen1...
http://carnival.slayn.net/images/screen2...
http://carnival.slayn.net/images/screen3...
http://carnival.slayn.net/images/screen4...
http://carnival.slayn.net/images/screen5...

I personally find the overland system works quite well for me. As I've done 99% of the work on Carnival of Carnage I find it hard to sit down and come up with descriptions for every or even nearly every room in a zone. And lets face it, how many of us hate zones where 90% of the rooms seem to have just copy/pasted descriptions? Instead I prefer to use objects and various programs to map out the zone and give it 'life' in terms of what a description would (could/should?) do.

I find it much easier to sit down and map out a single zone on a piece of graph paper and then plug all the information into Paint and I'm done, with the exception of any objects/scripts/resets that need to be created. While this process is probably not overly different than a builder creating standard zones with OLC I find it much faster. Before I had to create a mass of rooms (even at one point I added a command that allowed me and other builders to create 100s of rooms with a time), and then spend the time linking each of them, thinking of and writing descriptions, etc.

My Mud currently is running GodWars 1996 with a fairly heavily modified version of Samson's Overland snippet but I am in the process of rebuilding it from the ground up from MercNet.

In terms of resource usage, I've found I use less memory using the Overland as it has cut out a LOT of zones since I've moved them onto their own overland map and they use that system instead of standard rooms.

http://carnival.slayn.net/images/ventzon...

Please forgive the appearance of the above link, I wanted to make it fairly unusable for obvious reasons… :)

Essentially instead of having 100s of potential rooms that each zone would have in a standard area, I just have a single room that each area uses (as per the Overland snippet and then an area placeholder which stores the coodinates) and displays various information based on the coordinates the player is in.

Jin


EDIT: Wow, I thought I had more than 3 posts here.

Jindrak,

Thanks, for putting up the screen shots. Samson showed me his screen shots of overland. I don't like the player view, but the Immortal view is nice. I thought of using the immortal view for players, but Samson reminded me of the memory usage that could create if lots of players using it. I'm wondering how hard it would be to do size inbetween the 2 maybe then. I'm just not happy with how small the player view is.

My intent with Overland would not be to use it permanently per say, but to use it, until us builders can make appropriate filler areas between areas. I have good amount of areas made already, just want a little more realism when traveling to places about how long it should take to travel there.

Vladaar

Actually the wizard eye spell shot, is about 1/2 of immortal view, prob could use that and make it normal player view.

Vladaar

Here's our immortal view, which I personally like more than what I've seen a lot of other places do.



We have a few other sizes available, as well, depending on the conditions and merits of the player.

The ocean surrounding the landmass… it is predominately dark blue, with the bright blue showing a bit now and again, while the same can be said for the cyan (the cyan water is the shallow water). We also have a few other similarly changing sectors, such as outside of the cave of mist, some of the sectors in that area will at times show up as a bright white ~ to symbolize the fog.

But, I'm rather fond of the style we've gone with.

Also, to repeat what I said in a similar thread on TMC a few moments ago:

"If I were to start over with another theme, I think I'd incorporate an overworld map still, but in a much different manner. Rather than having dozens of room of travel on an overland map to get to one area to another, I think what I'd do is have it to where from one city to another, there are several 'meaningful' connecting areas, but between the city and the connecting area would be maybe 2-5 rooms of wilderness between them, just to have a visual overhead view of what the continent looks like around the areas. I don't think it would take away from the feel of connecting areas that most MUDs have, but rather enhance a player's understanding of the world."

For the most part, however, I think it really comes down to either liking them or not. If you don't like the way they look, I find it doubtful that any variation on the same thing will please you. It's quite difficult to really do much with the wilderness systems.

Oh, and I don't know if there is a screenshot anywhere of this system in action, but it's a rather different take on it than many others and is one of the more popular downloads here for the ROM Snippets:

http://www.mudbytes.net/index.php?a=file...

Thanks Hades,

I think I'm leaning towards using Samson's Overland code, but giving players the wizards eye view as default instead of the little
view they normally have. http://www.smaugmuds.org/index.php?a=pag...

I will use overland as little as possible, eventually hoping to replace it with actual connecting areas,
but I see how it will really help form my world in the mean time.

Vladaar

From a cosmetic perspective…I noticed some muds use ANSI background colours as well. I tried introducing some to see what it would look like for my maps, but the response from my players has been overwhelmingly negative. Of course it could just be that they've gotten used to the current colouring style…

Anyone else have any thoughts on the use of background colours?

background colours in the overland/wilderness maps for me didn't go well, allot of people don't have clients that support it, so it can be problematic in that sense.

As for the best overland/wilderness system. The best one is the one you write to best suit your needs. Currently I'm working on one for my dev mud, the goal is for it to generate a short description to go with it, based on its sector type, and the surrounding sector-types, if combat is going on nearby. The question you have to ask yourself is, do you want it to just be raw ascii graphics, or do you want it to be more.

A note on this, I've seen afew muds that created their own font style-set, so that when your on the wilderness, the font comes out as little houses, and you look like a little stick man, and all sorts of fun things like that. So thats another thing you might want to take into consideration.

But personaly, I suggest writing your own, as then you get it to be exactly how you want it to be. Case and point, samson's overland doesn't wrap, you hit the borders and you stop.. This can be easily changed, but then KaViR's wilderness system lets you roam around in circles. You could compare for days, when instead you could simply just write ground up, and have the base system done in afew hours.

Anyways, just my 2cents.

I wasn't aware that you hit boundary walls with Samson's overland. What I would love is a dyanmic overland loading system, so it didn't draw on memory until someone was entering the overland. Guess I'll pester my coder to see if he can manage something like that.

Vladaar

If you don't have a boundry (i.e., the world wraps around), it strongly implies that the wilderness represents the entire world - which can seem a bit strange if your wilderness is only a few miles across. The approach I've used with my current system is to say that any terrain outside the scope of the array is psuedorandomly generated from templates rather terraformed by hand. It means you can technically keep going as far as you like, although the terrain outside the central part of the world is pretty boring. At some point I'll expand it and add some detail, but the terraformed part is supposed to be the usual place to hang out.

I've seen background colors used quite nicely in some instances, but I've seen it terribly used in others. I think that largely depends on how it is setup, and of course players don't tend to like things they aren't used to, so that's problematic if you didn't start out that way.

dynamic loading of the wilderness you say, that is very do-able, pending on how your going todo it. the whole map loads/unloads as people are on the map or not. Even loading a large block of x/y's would be easy todo, however, you'd have to keep track of what was loaded and what-not, so as you started to approach the bounds of what was loaded, to load the next block (also not hard) especialy with the png loading code from the overland snippet. simple modification of it and you could load up a nice large chunk of overland, one piece at a time :)