Thoughts: Extending the mapper
Posted: Mon Dec 08, 2014 12:21 pm
Hey.
I'm extremely happy how easy the mapper is so far (my MUD of choice supports gmcp and the data is reasonably good, so most of the implementation so far is just a simple trigger). Works like a charm.
But there's a catch, a small thing that - now that I have a map and get used to it - starts to bother me: Z coordinates/heights. This MUD here has various maps that are hills/mountains, and ('correctly') changes the reported Z coordinates accordingly. The thing is, there are no different layers in these cases. Nothing's below the hill (vs. floors on top of each other in a building for example). It's just a regular map with some topological details, if you want to put it that way.
Trivial example would be a hill side like
0,0,0 -> 1,0,1 -> 2,0,2 (that is, x/y/z, x is constantly increasing/I'm always going east but also up)
The mapper is designed for the (probably more common) building case: It shows rooms on the same height level only. Which means that a lot of my maps are less useful than I'd like, because I stand in a single room with exits leading ~somewhere~ and have no awareness of my surroundings: Neither the path to the top nor the way back down is visible.
I jumped on IRC and people were quite helpful, but in the end the discussion lead to 'probably bad luck' and as far as I understand, the mapper itself is not written in Lua and not supposed to be customized (map data is, not the mapper itself though).
Given the description above:
- Is there a magic option in the mapper that might make this possible already? Did I miss something?
- If we imagine that I'd have unlimited time and enough interest, would it be possible to 'fix' that use case while staying with Lua only? Any pointers?
Thanks in advance!
I'm extremely happy how easy the mapper is so far (my MUD of choice supports gmcp and the data is reasonably good, so most of the implementation so far is just a simple trigger). Works like a charm.
But there's a catch, a small thing that - now that I have a map and get used to it - starts to bother me: Z coordinates/heights. This MUD here has various maps that are hills/mountains, and ('correctly') changes the reported Z coordinates accordingly. The thing is, there are no different layers in these cases. Nothing's below the hill (vs. floors on top of each other in a building for example). It's just a regular map with some topological details, if you want to put it that way.
Trivial example would be a hill side like
0,0,0 -> 1,0,1 -> 2,0,2 (that is, x/y/z, x is constantly increasing/I'm always going east but also up)
The mapper is designed for the (probably more common) building case: It shows rooms on the same height level only. Which means that a lot of my maps are less useful than I'd like, because I stand in a single room with exits leading ~somewhere~ and have no awareness of my surroundings: Neither the path to the top nor the way back down is visible.
I jumped on IRC and people were quite helpful, but in the end the discussion lead to 'probably bad luck' and as far as I understand, the mapper itself is not written in Lua and not supposed to be customized (map data is, not the mapper itself though).
Given the description above:
- Is there a magic option in the mapper that might make this possible already? Did I miss something?
- If we imagine that I'd have unlimited time and enough interest, would it be possible to 'fix' that use case while staying with Lua only? Any pointers?
Thanks in advance!