The Mana World Forums

I think this game needs some new features like a large map.
I love the mini map in the corner of the screen but I dont know the surranding world to well
have a map feature would be helpful if we could press m key to bring up a map

and a side note for this idea is the map could show players and npc's

Hi,

I had this idea somewhen as well.

sketcherskt wrote:...and a side note for this idea is the map could show players and npc's

The problem is that the server would need to inform all players + npcs about each other on the map. This is not really possible atm.

When discussing ideas for Source of Tales we also discussed seemless overworld maps. So for the player it looks like you only play on a single outdoor map. When having that we can also set together a worldmap nicely. At the moment it is not really possible since maps are overlapping / do not match in a grid. So positions of the players and npcs on the map are not really calculateable.

Well maybe we will have something like this... At least it would be cool.
Along with active quest symbols showing you where to go.

Ablu wrote:At the moment it is not really possible since maps are overlapping / do not match in a grid. So positions of the players and npcs on the map are not really calculateable.

You could add the world position in tiles of the upper left corner of every map as a map property.

In the mid-term, there's probably no technical problem with allowing NPCs and players to be visible map-wide, only monsters likely need the limited radius.

This is, of course, assuming the client is not stupid enough to try drawing them even though they're off the screen.

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For overground maps, there's some effort to make sure they actually line up, and there is an incomplete, outdated table with the relative offsets on each continent.

Current underground maps don't follow any reasonable sort of geometry so unless they are totally remapped they can't be fixed.

Recommended approach:

• Add properties for continent, x, and y. Allow negative offsets. This is important, for if the continent is expanded up and left.
• Generate minimaps for all those maps, and keep them permanently. Ignore the existing minimap property.
  (is there any reasonable use case for disabling minimap generation? I've thought a lot about it and can't justify it, except in the case of randomly generated maps which would require huge changes to client and server architecture)
• Dynamically stitch together each continent's minimaps on a grid going from (min_x, min_y) to (max_x, max_y). Be aware that max_x and max_y must be calculated based on the bottomright=topleft+size of each map, not the property which is the topleft of the map!