Mista-mage123 wrote:

For the staff, it's as simple as reverting the Big Icon behavior to what it was before they made it so it disappears like that.

I'm not sure big icons at any point were limitless in terms of how far the engine would go to look for them. The limits that went in on those I believe were there from the beginning IIRC.

Pixel offsets were another matter. For pixel offsets, we had the engine using the biggest pixel offset in existence to determine how far over it should look. After this turned out to be relatively crippling to Naruto GOA (due to some buggy projectile code I believe), that too was limited in the same way big icons are.

This 'bug' annoys the hell out of me. I call it a bug, because before I updated, I could freely put large background turf images on a map without worrying about it completely vanishing on me ingame.

Given the above, I don't see how that's possible.

Lummox JR

Fugsnarf wrote:

I'd like you to name for me 5 useful ways to use large icons when they disappear when out of range. I can hardly think of 3. It's almost completely useless this way that they disappear. You can't map with the large icons, you can't have players with large icon overlays. The best I can think of is a title screen, because even if your camera doesn't move, the icons still disappear when you move away from them.

How big are these icons? The current system should offer a few tiles of "view padding" (I believe it is four tiles in each direction) so that unless the icon is quite large, it should always show up in view. If you are seeing otherwise, we have a bug.

I agree that the current behavior is not ideal and it is something we have plans to fix. We thought it better to get this released in a limited capacity (where only games using extremely large icons would have an issue) rather than waiting on an ideal solution.

Those kind of things are static and so are best done with turfs. Using a turf with an extended icon is a pretty silly idea which will only lead to issues such as this; what should be done is have your large graphic broken up into multiple turfs, which will of course always be properly visible. The map editor used to do this for automatically when you laid down an atom with a large graphic, but now unless your map_format is TILED_ICON_MAP, it will lay it down as a single object with a 'big native icon' that creates a visual appearance extended beyond the location of the actual object. With turfs, this behavior only causes issues...

You're misunderstanding something here. As I've said, the map editor had (and still has, but you unfortunately have to use world/map_format = TILED_ICON_MAP to use it*) a feature that automatically split atoms with large icons into multiple atoms when you laid them on the map. Test it out, it should basically work just like you want (unless you have to use a different map_format).

*: I request this to be changed. It should be clear by now that this feature is helpful regardless of your map_format, mainly when dealing with turfs.

I wonder: if you import a large image so it's broken up into 4-tile sized chunks, and then name it according to the old format (0,0;1,0;2,0;ect) would Add automagically reconstruct the image like it used to? (but this time taking the larger native icon support into account)

If not, that might be a good middle-ground feature.

Big icons vanishing is a non-issue, it's been stated before games run slowly when loading too much stuff out of view. Just break the icon into manageable chunks and place them on the map accordingly. Your game will run smoother with less huge objects and you won't see anything vanish while going off screen.

You don't know your ABC's?

I don't appreciate you inadvertently calling me or my mapping methods horrible, it was uncalled for. The point I was attempting to illustrate was people are perfectly capable of breaking large icons down and mapping them by hand. Importing and cutting up the icon is already automated to boot. Mapping that truck literally took less than a minute.

It worked within BYOND's limitations and caused me no grief whatsoever. The inability to adapt to the current system or unwillingness to do anything even remotely tedious says more about the game developer than it does the development suit.

SuperAntx wrote:

The point I was attempting to illustrate was people are perfectly capable of breaking large icons down and mapping them by hand.

The point I was attempting to make is that one shouldn't need to define 40 different object types that represent a single entity, and then lay all of them down manually. This is a task that should be much easier to do, and can be done so even in the current system in more than one way (without compromising the in-game results).

Importing and cutting up the icon is already automated to boot.

Laying it down was also automated; but they replaced that automated function with a different one, that also places the entire big graphic automatically, but causes vastly inferior results as far as mapping turfs go. In light of that, you can't really say that making the old feature inaccessible a mistake.

Mapping that truck literally took less than a minute.

That's no feat whatsoever. For what is considered one entity (as far as mapping goes), you should say "less than 3 seconds".

It worked within BYOND's limitations and caused me no grief whatsoever.

Well, grief is subjective. I have no problem doing as much work as needed, but when I need to do more work than how much should be needed, I classify that as "grief".
Also, needless to say, saying merely "it worked" is meaningless. If the map editor was extremely sluggish and took an hour to process laying down a tile, you could still say that "it worked". The question is how well it worked, compared to how well it could work.

The inability to adapt to the current system or unwillingness to do anything even remotely tedious says more about the game developer than it does the development suit.

Since I've already made myself clear and I don't care why you take this personally, I feel no need to reply to this as well.

It would be easy to automatically split and place the background across the entire map at runtime using a loop or two, though. You don't need to do all the work manually.