Exult Forum

I'm looking for a large world map of Black Gate. I'm aware of the one at http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~wpalenst/ultima/ but that one shows mountaintops... I'd prefer one that shows the dungeons. Can anyone help?

I've got one of those as well

http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~wpalenst ... oroofs.png

Another thing that would be cool would be a roof-less map that included the people (maybe in their initial positions or something) and maybe some monsters etc.

Not sure how difficult that would be to produce.

This is the most beautiful Ultima7-related thing I've ever seen
By the way, speaking of rooftops, I wonder if there would be a way to remove only the rooftop you're under, and not the other ones. I always felt strange when - entering a house - I could suddenly see the inside of the other surrounding houses as well.

I am trying to implement this in my rpg and I can see only two ways:
the explicit one (marking each rooftop element of a certain roof with a unique id)
or a "smart" one which tracks the adjacent rooftop elements do determine where the roof ends...

smart one sounds better.

Smart one would be also applyable to Exult.
Now, on my particular engine it's quite a hell catching up the adjacent frames due to the nature of how the world data is organized... but you have to do that just when you step under a roof element, and when you step out of it.

The 'smart' method does sound good.

Thanks wjp! That map is perfect!

wjp: How did you generate that map, I would like to do the same for the mod I'm working on. My u7map and u7chunks are completely different, and my shapes.vga has had some shapes replaced.
It would help in the editing process.

Check the 'buildmap' command line option:

http://exult.info/docs.php#command_line

Excelent map! Would it be possible to get a map with the NPCs?

A map of SI with no roof too

You can find one here, although it's in low quality.

http://membres.lycos.fr/sergorn/ultima/ ... ndex.shtml

Without roof

you know, if you get a little creative with the link posted by wjp, you might find what you are looking for...

The problem is that it doesn't create a single map. It creates lots of PCX images. Is there a command to make it make a single map? If not, how can I join the files in a single one?

Try ImageMagick's montage.

actually I meant the link wjp gave in the 2nd post in this thread.

wjp: Gonna check it out.

Dominus: you mean this? http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~wpalenst ... /SImap.png

ImageMagicks is command line based.

yes of course. So?

RTFM

Angelo: No, of course I meant
http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~wpalenst ... oroofs.png which is really just a slight correction of wjp's first answer.

Dominus: Angelo wasn't asking for SImap_noroofs; Achile was.

ah, kind of hard to keep it all in order

Read a complicated manual just to use the program once? Nah. I hate command lines. Although I still remember using DOS, years ago...

Sometimes ImageMagick is the only practical way to do things. Suppose you have 4 images that you want to resize to 64x64 pixels. You could do those easily in a graphics program. Now suppose you have 100 images you want to resize.

Don't cry and do your homework. Command-line is more than 100 times faster than graphical interface.

That's an understatement. Oh, the joys of batch files...

I don't think so. It would be easier to add images I wanna join using a dialogue window, select all and execute, than writting 140+ ultima pcx names in the command line. For example.


About the batch files, I wonder if those map authors used this software and, if yes, if they use batch files (that could be sent to me )...

> It would be easier to add images I wanna join using a dialogue window,
> select all and execute, than writting 140+ ultima pcx
> names in the command line.

That's what wildcards/globbing are/is for.

> About the batch files, I wonder if those map authors used
> this software and, if yes, if they use batch files (that could be sent to me )...

Yes, I used montage (that's why I mentioned it). No, I didn't use a batch file. It's just one command after all.

to give a concrete example, say you want to move every PNG file with name (before extension) ending with "_big" to a folder "Big", you would do:
$ mv *_big.png Big

Now tell me how you do that with GUI tools as fast as I would.
Note, this is not a rant about GUI. I'm just trying to show you it is worth using command line sometimes (or often or always depending on who you talk with)

Artaxerxes

or say you want to move all files ending with _aa, _ae and _af to a folder "stuff", you would do:
$ mv *_a[aef].png stuff

How do you do that with a GUI? If you ever can, is it faster?

Hi guys,

I think most of the stuff you've been describing could be done easily using the batch options included in Irfanview (which is a GUI-application).

It's a Windows app, yet it should run under Wine too.

Gerry

> Yes, I used montage (that's why I mentioned it). No, I didn't use a batch file. It's just one command after all.


It would be great if you could tell me what is that command.


About the Command Line vs GUI issue: that's right, there are things it's more practical doing with command lines than with a GUI, and vice-versa. So it depends on each one's needs. I, for example, won't ever need (or very rarely) to use the commands you discribed. It's very neat saying you can do this and that... But if I don't need that, why bother?

Sometimes knowing how to make batch files is useful (sometimes I do it to rename lots of files, to make backup-making batch files, etc). But in this case, there's only one task I need, and after that I won't need anymore. Is it just being lazy for not wanting to spend hours reading a manual and figuring out how to do it?

Don't be so lazy. You need it now, so learn how to do it. You have spent HOURS expecting someone to tell you how to do it, when you would have only spent MINUTES reading the manual and doing it yourself.

> So it depends on each one's needs.

That's very naive. Your so-called needs depend a lot on what you know you can do. The more tools you learn, the more you'll find you can use them to perform tasks you "need" to do, even if using them would never have occurred to you before.

Saying you don't want to learn how to use a tool just because you can't see many uses for it now sounds very short-sighted to me. But of course it's your decision to make.



Anyway, montage:

montage blue.png green.png red.png yellow.png -tile 2x2 -geometry +0+0 -borderwidth 0 m.png

That command tiles blue.png, green.png, red.png, yellow.png (the first filenames) into a 2x2 (the -tile bit) image with zero borders (borderwidth and geometry) called m.png (the last filename)

You can probably adjust it yourself to tile all 144 .pcx files into a single file. It does need a lot of memory, though, so if you plan to scale the map down afterwards, you might want to scale it down a bit before montage-ing them together.

Well, technically I didn't spent hours waiting, as I wasn't waiting doing nothing, I was occupied with other things. While reading the manual would be spending the time with something that won't be useful to me in the future.

wjp: thanks for the command. I guess that i have to substitute those filenames with ultima's (and the 2x2 thing too, I guess with 12x12?). Doubt: How can I know the software will put the images in the right order?

By the way, I have 512MB ram, can I make a montage in full scale, or I'll run ou of memory?

512mb probably isn't enough. It used up 1.5Gb of RAM and 10Gb of temp files here. It seems to be storing images in a 8 byte per pixel format internally. Maybe colourspace related. I could try experimenting a bit to see if a different target colourspace works with less memory.

Order: you have to specify the images in the right order. That's u7map00.pcx, u7map10.pcx, u7map20.pcx, ..., u7mapb0.pcx, u7map01.pcx, u7map02.pcx, ..., u7mapb2.pcx, ..., u7map0b.pcx. ... u7mapbb.pcx. In bash that could be done with

u7map[0-9ab]{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,a,b}.pcx

but I'm not sure how the windows shell handles wildcard expansion. (Or you could rename the files to make the order more logical.)


Oh, the geometry option may have to be -geometry 2048x2048+0+0, by the way. (Otherwise the tiles might get scaled down to the default 120x120 pixels).