map formats on TMWserv
Posted: 02 Jul 2008, 15:38
Hi, I don't know if this is already set or not. But I thought there might be a lot of practical benefits in choosing which ways the maps are coded.
To illustrate what I mean, consider the old coding for eathena:
This makes for low readability.
Consider the following alternative for a small 10 by 10 map
Of course as we start using more and more tilessets, each with more tiles in it, one character/tile wouldn't do it. And we could have 2 or 3 characters/tile. (2 characters=> (26+10)^2 combinations=1296 different tiles; 3 characters => 46656 combinations)
The practical benefit,
1. It makes it very easy to fix mapbugs in textformat if you know where to look.
2. It makes it a lot easier to copy parts of maps when one map overlaps the other.
3. Experienced mappers can even map entirely from texteditor.
The downside of course would be that the mapfiles become a lot larger, but I don't know whether this increase in length would really cause any problems, since textfiles don't really take up much space.
To illustrate what I mean, consider the old coding for eathena:
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...
<layer name="Collisions" width="200" height="130">
<data encoding="base64" compression="gzip">
H4sIAAAAAAAAAO2Z2Y7dOAwFM/f/P3qQBwOGI8laSB7KKgIFTDq3tZCn7O7M7/fnzw8AAAAAAAAAAAA+xb1WPgOwMxGlviNAL+pS3x+gRNZS9wXOZpdS9wnOYsdS9wzOYOdS9w6+x9dK3U/4Dl75VJe6r7A/Xy91f2EfTi91/yEvX6/eO6rnALmg/i31TEDPzhVxB...Consider the following alternative for a small 10 by 10 map
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...
<layer name="Collisions" width="10" height="10">
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxx----xxx
xxx----xxx
xxx----xxx
xxx--xxxxx
xxx--xxxxx
xxx----xxx
xxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx
...The practical benefit,
1. It makes it very easy to fix mapbugs in textformat if you know where to look.
2. It makes it a lot easier to copy parts of maps when one map overlaps the other.
3. Experienced mappers can even map entirely from texteditor.
The downside of course would be that the mapfiles become a lot larger, but I don't know whether this increase in length would really cause any problems, since textfiles don't really take up much space.
thx for the correction, but eitherway, still seems like something worth considering?