Map Layers

ID:135535
 
Jul 1 2004, 4:07 am
It would be nice to be able to hide some layers on a map. Say you are making a house and have a roof that is layed 99, well, rather than having to deleted the roof whenever you want to update something in that house, you just turn off the layer. That is just one use I thought of. This could be very useful in many other ways, say hiding the mob layer to allow sight of an item below. Or hiding areas that look really ugly when they have no icon.
Jul 1 2004, 4:40 am
One trick I use is to give certain atoms one icon in the mapmaker and another at runtime. For instance in Darke Dungeon, unpassable divider turfs appear as a red block and NPC blocking turfs appear as a yellow dot in the mapmaker. At runtime, the dividers turn to black blocks to blend with map edges, and the NPC blockers have no icon at all, allowing the area icon to show through.

How do you do it? Set the atom's icon as normal for your desired mapmaker icon, but overide the atom's New() proc to set it to the value you want at runtime.
turf/NPC_blocker
    icon = 'yellowdot.dmi'
    New()
        ..()
        icon = null

I recommend faint dithers for area mapicons that obscure other atoms. For your roof problems, get RoofLib! ;) With it, you can paint your roofed areas in the mapmaker without obscuring anything.
Jul 1 2004, 5:00 am
In response to Shadowdarke
Not a bad idea, but, with that roof lib, then you dont know what roof you have painted on(without rightclicking and whatnot). It works, but it is not the best solution. Using fake icons in the map maker is a good idea for areas, just like many map makers have for hidden tags such as player spawn points and lights.
Jul 1 2004, 5:34 am
In response to Scoobert
Scoobert wrote:
Not a bad idea, but, with that roof lib, then you dont know what roof you have painted on(without rightclicking and whatnot).

Ah, I forgot that most people use turf icons for floors. I've become used to using area icons for floors and leaving the default turf icon blank. That way turfs that have no mask, like a closed door, still shows the apropriate floor icon when the icon or icon_state changes. You'll notice that the RoofLib demo follows that standard.

You can still apply the map icon/runtime icon trick I posted above with RoofLib covered areas. The area icon and layer operates independantly of the area's cover icon.