Visual Diary: Building Maps – Part 1

The Cartographer view in Daggerfall Scout is a continuous map interface, allowing you to zoom all the way out to see the whole Illiac Bay at once, or zoom right in to street level to see individual ground detail and buildings. The location browser on the left is for quickly finding a location.

 CartographerDev2

Prototype

The first step was to quickly prototype a dynamic scrolling map. The screenshot to the left renders each world cell using a single texture (from TEXTURE.002, .102, .302, and .402 depending on climate type). Locations are just plotted as red squares.

This fairly basic setup solves most of the early problems, and helps me visually confirm my new ultra-fast world queries are working. Now to throw out the experimental code and write it again properly.

 CartographerDev4

Top-Level Map

There will be several levels of fidelity to the map. To start with we have the whole Illiac Bay on-screen at once. On the left is the first version of this map. Water is blue, land is grey, and locations are just yellow dots. So many locations!

I tried several different approaches here before settling on dynamic textures mapped to quads. The next step is to add some details.

 

 CartographerDev6

Region Coding

This picture colours each region band appropriately. The colours have been averaged from the actual region ground textures. Location dots have been disabled so I can see details.

 CartographerDev7

Height Shading

Next I have modified climate colours based on elevation of the landscape. As you zoom in, this will be replaced by actual deformed terrain and textured ground.

Nothing here is pre-generated, this is all built dynamically by reading data from MAPS.BSA (locations), CLIMATE.PAK (climate), POLITIC.PAK (region) and WOODS.WLD (elevation data). Every “world pixel” is built from a combination of data from these sources.

 CartographerDev8

Zooming In

This screenshot is a slightly zoomed-in version of the above. This is about the limit of the top-level map, once you zoom in much further, 3D elevation maps will start to be paged in. My next post will show the process of this being added.

Posted in Daggerfall Scout, Visual Diary.