The Making Of Feudums
IV. Creating a map
As we intend to give you insight into the project, Derek has just started a somewhat technical topic about The Making of FEUDUMS. If you're interested to learn about techie black magic and fascinating technical dilemmas, you may want to follow it!
Hi guys,
I’ve already posted a map related article but that introduced the maps from a player’s perspective. Today I’ll write about a more technical perspective - how we store the map info, how we edited and managed the data.
When we started to work on the basics of the Feudums game engine, the first idea was to store the map information in an image. An RGBA image has 4 component values and using the 0-255 range with different meanings it gave enough space to store lots of information. We described the tile type with the red value and blue has been the rivers, etc.
The rough concept behind the image map was that we were going to modify the map by a simple drawing application, where we can modify the pixels' colour values comfortably. It sounds easy indeed, and was OK till we had just developer maps. Drawing a vast plain is not a problem with a painting tool but you can imagine how hard it could be if you want to get an ultimately diverse map that will fit with the players' expectation. Modifying every unique pixel’s colour values - a nightmare to say the least.
Not being suicidal, as soon as we had to prepare the first map for the first teaser video, we gave up the idea that we would draw the maps by hand, and we brought up the map editor on the task list.
The map editor has always been the part of the game because we want to open up the worlds for the players to create and form their own maps to play on.
With the new map editor, creating a new map became an easy job. But creating a good map still remains a challenge...
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