automap for dungeons?

[darkman]

Wouldn't it be nice to have an automap for the dungeons a la Ultima Underworld? I remember, when I played Ultima 7 some years ago, that I mapped the dungeons to not overlook some objects or hidden parts, and I really hated it. After about 3/4 of Ultima 7 part 2 I lost interest and played some other games, and somehow never loaded it again. I don't know how difficult it would be to implement (my programming knowledge isn't too good), but I would like to have such an option.
How do you feel about it?

darkman

[Alan Kawolski]

Remember those "treasure maps" in Serpent Isle that you could find? Wouldn't it be nice if a couple of those of dungeons were left around in places in Britannia of the various dungeons (in appropriate places of course). Like the bee-cave dungeon map would be in the Lycceum (sp:?) and the plans for the "Wrong" dungeon would be in the third unfinished cave...etc.

These maps wouldn't tell you were all the traps are or where you were at all times in the dungeon, but that wouldn't be realistic and take out the fun of it... ;P

Alas, I am not an artist.

[Dominus]

Automap is a feature that is already in our feature request tracker. Might be something that gets implemented after Exult 1.0

[Tim]

An automap could really detract from the challenge of the game. There are some dungeons that zap you all around via teleporters (I'm thinking of one in SI especially... up in the arctic area, and the Mountains of Freedom, Despise, Isle of the Avatar). An automap would take away the "Where the hell am I?" aspect of those dungeons, making it a lot easier to get through them.

[Pan Sola]

how about adding a map drawer tool to the game engine?

What I mean is that after say you open an existing ingame map (a few do exist), you get a pencil tool and an eraser tool, and you can draw on the map indicating traps, secret doors, as you discover them.

And you can double click on the quill and use it on those notes or paper, and draw your own map from scratch in-game!!!

On a second thought, it's probably easier to open the map, print-screen, and use a real pencil to draw on the printed map...

[Soul Harvester]

You can easily go inside a dungeon, set the resolution very high, take 2-3 screenshots and viola, 10-15 minutes in paint and you have a complete, in-game detail map, from which you can create whatever else you'd want, such as a pencil map, whatever. For a while I was making overhead maps of the towns that way, because I liked to be able to see an entire city at once.

[hoeksmas]

Then again theres always the complete dungeon maps that were in the Ultima 7 BG, and Serpent Isle hintbooks. So I guess one could just scan up these maps, and with a little photoshop touchup they'd probably look pretty good

[Max aka Moscow Dragon]

I have huge 2MB GIF maps for both U7s.

[wjp]

For those of you that don't know:

exult has the capability to build a 400Mb+ full-sized map of both BG and SI.
To use it, start

exult (-game serpentisle) -buildmap 0/1/2

add -game serpentisle to do a SI map, don't add it for a BG map
use 0 to show roofs, 1 to show only level 1 roofs, 2 to clip all roofs

Note: this will create a map of your current game. You might want to start a new game first

This will create 12x12 .pcx files, that together form the full map.
Be sure to have plenty of RAM, HD space and time available

(Oh, and exult creates a 2048x2048 pixel window, so you'll probably want to run in windowed mode, unless your monitor supports resolutions higher than 2048x2048 )