Maps

This is not a gripe. I am just wanting to know what is going on with the maps and is it being reviewed by Catnip. The missing maps seem to be getting worse. There are some scenes that I know had maps at one time, but no longer do. Does Catnip acknowledge the issue? Or is Catnip not concerned at all if all the maps disappear?

 

Last I saw the official comment was theyre working on them, theyre done by hand and time consuming to make.

 

I'd love to know what exactly "done by hand" entails..........

 

I wish I could find the post for you. My search-fu on these forums is lacking.

 

My bet is they didn't bother to develop a streamlined tool to make new content, so the dev who makes the scene needs to generate the map image, tweak it manually and feed it to some cordinate system that will concatenate the image with the player's position.

 

I'd just be happy of the arrow on the map was where my character was.

 

Maps are still an on going process for adventuring areas. Dungeon maps however will require new tech, which they don’t have yet, and we don’t know any eta for that. A bit more information and discussion on this is also here:

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...for-every-scene-in-the-game-currently.165146/

 

If only dozens of people had already developed that tech and had it for sale at a reasonable price.

https://assetstore.unity.com/?q=minimap&orderBy=1

 

Render the scene top-down using an isometric camera, maybe use a simplified renderer so you're not doing a bunch of unnecessary stuff and Bob's your uncle.

 

I did art maps of the Novia continent. And cities.
Motivate me.

 

Today (or was it yesterday) is the 5th anniversary of Ep.1 being completed.

Maps, at this stage, or even the underlying technology, shouldn't be a WIP. That should have been one of the fundamentals.

 

Not to beat a dead horse, but the topic of maps being missing or broken comes up in nearly every review. It's one of the things that sticks out like a sore thumb to all new players.

... and we're half a decade after launch.

It's mystifying why this 5-alarm fire goes ignored year after year. "It takes time - it's a slow process". Okay, so why are they choosing a slow, tedious and manual way of approaching it? It's like the Quest System 1.0... there wasn't any apparent forethought or future proof way it was engineered. They took the quickest/easiest route from the onset, and now they're paying the price years down the road.

I've always found the development priorities to be misguided.

 

The core development was done by folks that had never made an MMO before or even really an RPG, so is it much of a surprise?

 

I've also made maps as well. I've made world, region, city, dungeon and battle maps for D&D Campaigns I've written. I could easily make maps for this game as well.

 

I don't think that's a road that they could/should go down.

It's similar to user-contributed voice acting. So they get the voice for some character all recorded and in, and then the dialog needs to be updated, but the original actor is not available? What then?

They're often adding/editing/removing maps. If you send them all updated maps for all existing zones, then are hit by a strangelet comet, what then? They may not know how to create new/updated maps that have the same look and feel.

Whatever solution they come up with should be an automated procedure. If they ever make the client open source, maybe people could volunteer help with that. Something, this time, not an external difficult-to-update website that's piped in through an abandoned browser plugin.