The Mana World Forums

Posted: **01 Sep 2008, 08:01**

Newbies are commonly unfamiliar with the geography of the world, the names of cities or specialities like "the bat cave". Therefore they are very lost at the beginning. Yes, reading the wiki would help a lot, but fair-minded, who reads the wiki first?

I suggest extending the maps.xml with at least one attribute called description. Maybe in the first run, one could use the descriptions from the wiki http://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/Map_development.

This description could be used in many places:

Character selection at login (where did your char wait for you?)
Entrance of a new map ("You entered the city/cave of ..")
This would need a maptype like "city, indoor, underground.." as additional attribute.
Information in tmwweb. Its better to present "Tulishmar" then "new_1-1" as location of a character to both, players and admins

The maps.xml could look like this (this shouldn't break the current Maphandler during parse):

Code: Select all

Index: maps.xml
===================================================================
--- maps.xml	(revision 4559)
+++ maps.xml	(working copy)
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 <?xml version="1.0"?>
 <maps>
-    <map id="1" name="new_1-1"/>
+    <map id="1" name="new_1-1" description="Tulishmar"/>
     <map id="2" name="new_2-1"/>
     <map id="3" name="new_3-1"/>
     <map id="4" name="new_4-1"/>

Posted: **01 Sep 2008, 09:12**

Why do the maps need to be called new_#-1.wlk anyway? Surely this would make the maintenance of TMW harder than if they were tulim.wlk, s-desert.gat, etc?

Posted: **01 Sep 2008, 09:34**

@Exceptionfault:

Maps.xml is a server-sided file. It should not even be in a 0.1 client installation.

But the information you mentioned could be easily included in the map files themself. The map format allows to add an arbitary number of key-value map property pairs.

@Shaggy:

Here are the map naming conventions which will be used on the new server after backward compatibility to 0.0.x has been abandoned: http://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/Map_naming

Posted: **01 Sep 2008, 09:37**

The supposed naming scheme of maps for the new server can be found here: http://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/Map_naming

The concept suggests a naming method after "continent-coordinates[_point of interest].tmx" which will result in something like this

argaes-c7.tmx
tonori-e5.tmx
tonori-e4_tulimshar.tmx

which is also not pretty, and should not be shown to the enduser. This leads us back to the description field.

Posted: **01 Sep 2008, 09:42**

Crush wrote: Maps.xml is a server-sided file. It should not even be in a 0.1 client installation.

Indeed, the server has to send the description to the client, if the user enters a new map.

Crush wrote: But the information you mentioned could be easily included in the map files themself. The map format allows to add an arbitary number of key-value map property pairs.

That would be possible, but its a lot more work for tmwweb. It has to read and parse all mapfiles and keep them in sync then just read one small and simple xml file.

Posted: **02 Oct 2008, 13:43**

I think that a much more elegant slution would be a "worldmap" button, that pops up a world map (possibly explored areas only) with useful info like: current locations, cities, quests...

Posted: **02 Oct 2008, 14:38**

I just committed a sourcecode change (to 0.0.x) which uses the "name" property of map files as the caption of the minimap window. Now it is up to the content dev people to add name properties to all map files.

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Extending maps.xml in 0.1.*

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