Member Discussions

Was poking around the net the other day
and I can't seem to locate the old snippet
for making the wilderness system. Now I think
back a few years ago I saw it as a smaug snippet,
I could however be very much mistaken. I was nosing
around a few different codebases at the time.

Has anyone seen the old wilderness snippet lately?
If so, got a nice addy to pass out?
Or if someone has the snippet and wants to put
it up again for others to use, that would be
great as well. Thanks in advance to those that
reply.

Try mudbytes.net?

Personally, I have never liked wilderness type systems. It's a resource hog on memory, and in my opinion shows that the builders cannot create meaningful connecting areas. More importantly though, I just don't like how they look.

If someone had a spectuacular wilderness code, that looked cool, I might change my opinion, but the one's I have seen suck.

Vladaar

What codebase are you running?

me?

Smaug.

I believe ryan_rae is too.

Vladaar

Here's one.

http://mudbytes.net/index.php?a=files&s=viewfile&fid=542

Vladaar

Well the over map that we use could be called a wilderness system. The way we coded it and set it up it won't hog memory. I'd like your opinion on what you think about it and maybe it will change your opinion. I think we did it right. Take a look and let me know always welcome to feed back.

thelastsunrise.net 9000

from where you will log it go down 8 east then type enter to get onto the over map.

I think someone will either like them or not. I've seen numerous different types, and when it comes down to it, they are all variations of the same thing, and this is coming from someone who uses one.

But of course, being Final Fantasy based, it's a very fitting thing that we use an overland map.

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.

Personally, I like what we've done on my game more than any of the others I've seen, but again I'm sure I'm at least a little bit biased :p

http://www.eotmud.com/mapscreen.jpg

Hello Kaneofls,

I would be greatly interested to get some more info on how you coded it to not use up alot of memory. I guess you do a loadup of the map on demand? I'm currently considering using the overland snippet out there by Samson of afkmud to add it with the wizardeye view as default for players. However doing so with the wizardeye view would definitely eat some memory. I just don't like the regular player view.

Vladaar

(Comment added by Vladaar on Sun Oct 14 2:30:52 2007)

Here's what the wizard's eye view looks like that is with the afkmud snippet of it.

http://www.afkmud.com/index.php?a=page&p=5

If i'm not mistaken, samson just uses 1 huge array that is always loaded into memory for his map, no matter what "view size" you give to the player, it'll use the exact same memory.

Just to throw in my two cents - on my mud we use an overhead map for the wilderness, which is about 6 million rooms. You can look at a partial screenshot here:

http://www.karinth.com/images/map.png

Our map engine is robust enough to allow us to create entire maps - this is a map of the whole mud (and is accurate down to the pixel, since it all comes from the overhead mapper):

http://www.karinth.com/images/world.gif

We incorporate such things as varying terrain, line of sight, elevation, and mobiles that only load in certain terrains, certain regions, etc. To save memory (a fair bit, mind you), rooms are dynamically generated on an as-needed basis. So, while we 'have' 6 million wilderness rooms, they're only generated when they need to be accessed (by a walking player, etc.), and then destroyed/freed.

Aelius,

Your World.gif is beautiful.

Vladaar

Nice. That's a great looking map you have there. I wish we'd had someone on the team who had the graphics talent to pull that off.

Nice. That's a great looking map you have there. I wish we'd had someone on the team who had the graphics talent to pull that off.

Thanks (Vladaar too). Like I said, though - that map was actually generated by our wilderness engine from all of the map data. What you see is accurate down to the very room, and can be updated easily to account for changes in the map. If you were able to zoom in enough, all of the dimension would be exactly the same as in the game. So nobody really 'drew' it in the conventional sense, although we do have basically a GIF editor inside the mud to deal with the map.

Sorry about revisiting this post, but have installed wilderness on our mud now too. I am wondering how you go about getting fonts that are like Aelius's for his world map?

Is it only a matter of making it with photoshop?

Vladaar

It seems to me that the ASCII-looking map is actually text output from the server. Then you can just view via your mud client and whatever fonts it has available.

Unless I misunderstood your question?