[Tocamat]

I am the Head builder of a Mud called Necromium. One of our game features is an overhead map. I have been logging into some of the muds listed in the TMS Top 100 looking for another mud with this feature.

*What I would like to know, is how you, my fellow builders feel about overhead mapping?

*I would also like to view other muds with this feature if you could provide addy's.

Below is a link to our muds (under construction) webpage. We have included a few screen shots of some of our game zones.

www.necromium.com/zonelist

If you are not familiar with overhead mapping, let me explain. These are not artists renditions. These maps are actually visible to players as they navigate a zone. What you see here is visible to a player in 4x4 or 6x6 sections.

[Molly]

That sounds like the map option that comes with the Wilderness Grid to me. We use it too, for the grids, but you have to type 'map' to display it. Didn't fancy having it on the screen all the time, it gets too spammy when you move around.

The maps are nice though, especially when you display them as 20x20 pics.

On a sidenote - not all our zones have the map function, just the grids.

Another mud I know that uses the grids is Lensmoor, there are probably tons of others.

[Zhymm]

Greetings, Tocamat.

I'm not a builder but I'm familiar with a few MUDs that sport the feature you're asking about. This sounds a bit like the ascii 'tile map' that appears as you move around the terrain. In fact, I like this feature and it's one thing I look for when 'checking out' a MUD for potential play (I guess I'll have to look at Necronium, now <grin>). A couple also have a 'map' command which displays a large overhead view of the area or a portion of the zone where one happens to be.

Act of War (www.actofwar.com port 4000 or bb11.betterbox.net port 4000) - sports an 8x8 tile map at left of screen during movement and its map command displays a 22x22 segment. Team pk (if you're into that), otherwise a pretty nasty place playerwise.

All Out War, a near twin of AoW above (aow.gotdns.com port 4000) - sports a 6x6 tile map during movement and a 30x30 map command (really nice map, here ... much 'prettier' than the one shown in the map command on Act of War). Playerbase has dropped to near zero.

Adventures Unlimited has(had?) the ascii tile map feature, though I haven't been there in awhile.

Hope this helps.

Zhymm

[OnyxFlame]

Dartmud (dartmud.com 2525) has a "hex map" for wilderness areas, which I described more in-depth in the wilderness thread, wherever that was. The size of the map (which in verbose mode is shown every time you move, but you can also type "survey" to see it) depends on the vision stats of your char and time of day, ranging from 1 hex to something like 2 or 3 hexes in all directions. I can't say anything about building aspects of it though, since I'm too addicted to playing there to code for them.

[Soki]

As a player, I'd be more interested in having a command that brings up a map than an "automap". Automaps in graphical games are a must because it's nearly impossible to map those areas, but on a mud, you can still get the graph paper out and do your own mapping (usually).

Anyway, I'm a big fan of self-maps or a command that pulls up a map. I think it would be minorly annoying to get an automap. I played a DIKU mud with an automap feature, but I think they've shut down since then. It wasn't horrible, but I didn't like it spamming me every step I took either.

[jornel]

On our mud we have a powerful automap that is command and argument driven, so what the map shows can vary and you don't get spammed every time you take a step (Zhymm, ask me and I'll show it to you).

We are currently putting specific parts of this automap into particular skills, spells and magic items that make IC-sense so as not to let automapping dominate the player's perception of the game.  Forgive me this small plug, but we do not want the automap features to disrupt the player's ability to remain totally immersed in the world evoked by our really top-notch descriptions!

[Eagleon]

Accursed Lands has a good (imho) wilderness map. It is handled by making the areas that are builder-made into places where you can enter by typing, for instance, enter path, and the rest is pretty much automatic. Forests, grasslands, ocean, etc, are all represented on your overview, and the distance you can see to is augmented by terrain type, weather, time of day, and your own skills. This solves the problem of being spammed to death too often, as the builder-made descriptions are there when you need them, i.e inside a town, but you can also see what's around you when travelling. It also provides a sense of real geography that is lacking in most other muds, as you do have to actually travel the land as opposed to following a short-cut, builder-made path. You can actually imagine the foothills of a mountain chain slowly give way to higher elevations, and also roleplay a thirsty groan as you begin your travel through the deserts that lie in the mountains' shadow.

[Chapel]

Normally I would say any visual enhancement to a text-based game is a good thing, however, as a once avid pkiller, I think an automap, especially one that signals the location of other players, will only serve to spoil me.

Usually I toggle those features off. The hunt is 80% of the thrill of PKing, the map serves to lessen that thrill my making it easy.

...

[Davairus]

On Abandoned Realms when a player types map, he gets a map of either western thera or eastern thera, depending on which he is in .. and the name of the area he is currently in is highlighted. So the bare essentials for exploring pretty much. Maps of specific areas are found in game, as items.

[xanes]

Well, I'm not a builder either, I'm more of a coder, and I think that an automap Would be useful as long as it doesn't take up much space.

When I wrote an automapper, All it did was loop for two rooms recursively in each direction and then printed the room description side-on to the map. So, the extra scoll was the number of characters not the number of lines the map comprised.

The major drawback to this was that the code to format the room descriptions is a little insane, but that's better than reformatting all the area files.

-Xanes -=- Lone Coder WinterMUTE