IceBlinkEngine.com

Howdy IceBlink community,

A couple weeks ago I stumbled on the IceBlink engine while playing around with some of my old RPG ideas, and I love the work you've done so far! Hopefully - if I can find a little time between work and being a new dad - I can join the community of developers here.

Have you considered including a fast travel world map, a la the Baldur's Gate series or Fallout 1/2? It seems to me this wouldn't be too hard to implement (it's just a JPG image with a few clickable spots that take the PC to area maps) and it would be a tremendous boon for giving a sense of place and distance to larger modules. I'm thinking of developing an adventure set in the medieval eastern Mediterranean, for example, and I'd love to be able to use an antique atlas as a fast travel world map.

Thanks very much for all your hard work! I'm looking forward to playing around with the next release of IB2.

-carademono

Yeah, we don't really have a world map system like baldurs gate or nwn2. The way it is now, we have a world map system more like what was in pools of radiance or like the overland map in NWN2:SoZ. I used it in lanterna 2 which worked well for me. When transitioning to the world map, the party token was changed to a small token showing four adventures on horses in a siloute of just black. A world map is just like any other map so you could use your single image map, place transitions at key locations, use a party token of anything that makes sense, etc. The player would then navigate the map square by square to travel to locations in the map. For fast travel, use a small grid with the map of maybe 8x8 or 16x16.

Ah, I see. That would work! And 16x16 is the maximum possible map size, correct? Along with an 800x800 pixel JPG? Sorry for the beginner question.

There isn't a hard restriction on the image size for a background image of an area so you could use something larger than 800x800, but it may cause issues on some mobile devices with limited ram. If you use tiles with no background image, you can have very large maps. I think my world map in lanterna 2 is 64x64 squares. Karl did create a system that will allow huge single image files to be used because it splits your image up into small tiles that area loaded as needed. He could explain more on how to use that option in IB2.

Welcome aboard, carademon !

As Jer just said, a fast travel world map is basically in already. You could change the party cursor to e.g a selection arrow or brackets and turn time per step to zero. This would make that area virtually a fast travel map (minus point and click via mouse).

Yes, IB2 allows optionally to use dynamic tile loading, even with very large hand drawn maps: the toolset will upon area creation break down any single image (must look whether there is a limit like 10k * 10k pix) into a myriad of small 50x50 px tiles. These will be loaded (and forgotten) on demand around the party.

Still, for design speed (and AI pathfinding speed) I would not use maps larger than 64x64 squares. Mayhaps even 32x32 squares as I paint on my smart ohone and that responds much more smoothly for a 1600px x 1600px than for a 3200x3200.

Now, for the player all maps painted can be made to appear seamlessly connected anyway. Just set them up as neighbours in area properties of the toolset. Once the party gets near the borders of current map the correct neighbour map tiles are loaded automatically. This way the player will not notice that he just switched from current map to neighbour map. Play around with this one, it's fun to create the illusion of a super huge world .

Thanks for the welcome, and for the comprehensive responses! I'd be very grateful for a quick tutorial on dynamic tile loading. I have an old map of Istanbul that's about 2000x1600 that I'd like to use in the game, and I couldn't figure out how to load images larger than 800x800. I cut it up into smaller chunks, which works pretty well, but you the are transitions are very apparent. My guess is, I'm doing everything wrong