Alright, I am trying to implement a world map into my game for players of a certain navigation-based profession to use. However, in order to encourage exploration, I want the map to be completely either pitch black or background ground color for all unexplored portions of the map.
This means that the map would be empty on what I imagine being an window that opens up via interface. But build itself together as your screen goes around the map thus building it.
P.S. If you have ever played Age of Empires, that is the kind of map that I am talking about.
Jul 4 2020, 1:00 am
Best response
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Lummox JR
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Sounds more like you're asking about how to implement a fog-of-war effect.
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Yes precisely! It would be amazing if it could work. Do you think it would be possible?
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How you implement FoW depends on if it's for multiplayer or not.
But the two methods you're limited to are additive, where you're selectively showing copies of what's on the map, or subtractive, where you use something like /image to hide part of the map. | |
Yes, it is multiplayer.
The thing is,i want the entire map visible. I just intend to give an object to players that lets them see a super zoomed out version of the map. And I want the FoW effect to apply to THAT not the world itself. | |
All right, so it sounds like every part of the image they'll see for this will have to be generated in some way. So for that, you really just need to create a bunch of tiles and present them to the player: some with content from the map or perhaps an icon that represents that content in shorthand form, and some that are blank because of the FoW effect. That seems pretty straightforward so I'm not sure what more you need in that regard.
The only big question here is how the filled-in tiles will be filled in. Simply using vis_contents to display all the turfs that each zoomed-out tile represents would be a very bad idea because if each tile were to count for, say, a 10x10 section of the map that's 100 turfs shown per tile. Icon operations such as icon.Blend() would be far worse. So you'll probably want a different way to come up with a way of displaying what's on the map in this form. Perhaps you'd do well to mock up a sketch of what you want. | |
https://prnt.sc/tcvldo
The box poorly circled in red is, as most devs know, the map of the entire given z-plane. An enlarged version of that map is what I want a completed version of the world map item to contain. I want the player map that they walk around on to remain all-seeing(aside from invisibility and opacity of course) However, if the player has never left the grassy island to go anywhere else, their map will look like this. (Try to imagine that the area highlighted in black is completely black and not transparent) https://prnt.sc/tcvt9o And this, would be how it would look if the player had travelled to two other islands to the north of the grass island aswell and even sailed the sea a little bit around the islands. https://prnt.sc/tcvvu4 And so I would want it to be a map that is only visible when the map item is used, and even then is only constructed as the player travels Eventually showing everything once the player has been everywhere on that given Z-plane. Also, I have no idea how to "create a bunch of tiles and present them to the player" since my experience with interfacing is minimal as well. Thanks! | |
You could create the minimap using either a screenshot of the map editor, or by making a proc that draws one for you, and then display it with a black icon on top. Then as the player travels around, use DrawBox(null, ...) to "unmask" the parts you have seen.
To do this you will have to become familiar with /icon objects, and be careful about eating up processing time. It would be prudent to avoid drawing transparent pixels when already present. | |