Sep 21
Overview map with water
Here’s a slightly updated version of the hacky “full MMORPG view” map, where I’ve begun setting many regions as “ocean” regions. In this case, I’ve told the MMORPG region generation routine that I want two main continents, much like WoW has. It’s pretty trivial to adjust this to have one huge landmass, or lots of tiny ones, or anything in between. I think that having the water there really does help a lot.
This still has about twice as many regions as the basic initial WoW release did (WoW has more regions than almost any other MMORPG out there, which is why I keep using it as a benchmark for playable game area), but it’s a lot less intimidating like this than it was in the previous screenshot I took. And it’ll be easy enough to remove more regions if it really becomes a problem.
September 22nd, 2009 at 12:10 am
I know you mentioned a few posts back about the level of detail getting lost at such a high altitude. But, seeing this water concept made me think.
What if you could add some high level details via coloring? So, heavily mountainous regions could be orange-red-yellow shades while lush-hillsides could be green. Dark green for forest zones (or maybe just the patches of forest inside of a zone).
You could split each zone into chunks (10×10), and then get a color description of that chunk. Then, blend between the chunks on their seems.
You still wouldn’t get to see elevation information, but you’d get feedback about the map. It’d be like a 3D mini-map, in a sense.
September 22nd, 2009 at 3:14 am
I like JDs idea.
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Looks nice, and very WOWish.
I’m just wondering if you’re planning on giving people the ability to raise/flood regions so that we can create our own worlds(like starting with this, then slowly shifting it into three islands connected). Maybe you could make a sort of unflooded regions limit(because of server strength(possible upgrade)). It might also be a good idea to create buildings people can in a sense teleport(like those flying ships in WOW) using some vehicle going through a similar portal the graveship goes through.
That and we’d luv you if you gave us one of your alphas(or whatever their being called right now). =-P
You’d also learn some valuable info about it runs on other computers.[/obvious-attempt-to-get-you-to-give-us-an-alpha]