This has been suggested before and I never found time to seriously get on with it.Dbug wrote:I was wondering about this map thing.
You have all the 'cubes' (rooms) in memory, right ?
Is it not possible in the info post to have an option 'map', showing in miniature the map of the complex, perhaps just drawing interconnected losanges, with a left<->right keys to move through the various cubes, showing the name of the room ?
I guess it's a significant amount of work, but it could probably makes the game a lot more playable for people that cannot print the map.
Just my 0.2 nok suggestion
(I can help doing that after I received and installed the new pc !)
The fact is that no, I don't have the map in memory. Well, yes, of course I have it, but just as a list of room IDs along with their data. Whenever the character gets to a room border, the destination ID is calculated just adding/substracting 1 or 16, depending on the direction, and the room is searched for in the list. There is no information about actual room connections.
Also there are no such things as "room names" per se. Just some rooms have a label (Koenig's quarters), others are grouped and share a common label (Corridor).
The way to go would be creating the necessary data "on the fly" as the user visits the station, and using the room labels (or other data table) to name sections.
I thought about setting a kind of general map of each level and load it from disk when the player requests this from the infopost. This would be the best idea. Just need to add a dot where the player is (You Are Here).
Again the problem here is someone with good painting skills should create these maps from the real maps from the user's guide and we just need to find the way of locating each infpost in those pictures (just a table with roomID where the infopost is and (x,y) coordinates would do). The pic should not interfere with the game frame... just the area where the room is displayed.
Volunteers?