Crossfire Forum

Like the subject says.. Once you make it to one town, why would you forget where it is? An automap would mark your location on a big pop-up screen and allow you to use your climbing/forestry skills to take a short-cut from town to town, rather than keep using long roads (not the map it-self, but you would be more likely to use your outdoors abilities if you could take a short-cut)...

Things were easy before big-world maps.. Places were not that far apart, and it was easier to walk diagnally till you reached certain spot, and then walk down few squares to find the place you're looking for.. Map back then may not have been necessary.. But with big-world maps..

I don't know how this could be implemented.. We already have the spell "magic mapping".. Perhaps with cartography, you could use magic mapping to pop up a bigger map of the outdoors..

I've been having to refer back to the "small map" world that I'm running at home and "guestimate" the approximate location of a town or hole or tower, then run around the Big World for .5 to 1 hr trying/hoping to find the right place...

EG: it took me 1/2 hour of wandering around north of Santo Dominion before I finally located the Tower Of Demonology.

I am still trying to locate the Tower of Stars as well as this "hole" in the mountains south of Brest (used to be a great XP run with good items too. Almost a easy and more effective than an Administration "Run" in Brest)

Most of these places would never be found unless someone knew about them beforehand - I mean really... who is going to go wandering around through that great big EMPTY wilderness with the small hope that they run into something really cool?

I know the website has location listings for most of the good places to go for items or exp or just some good Role-Play But we need more signs or something on the big world maps that would point or say something like: Head 50 leagues North "to find something really cool" LvL 10-20. Or some other kind of road map... or even better, a world map that has locations or "MapMarks" that we can "pin" something on.

As it stands I printed out a colour copy of the Big World Map and am slowly adding markers to it to give me an idea of where things other than twons are :p

RovinRogue wrote:Most of these places would never be found unless someone knew about them beforehand - I mean really... who is going to go wandering around through that great big EMPTY wilderness with the small hope that they run into something really cool?

I know the website has location listings for most of the good places to go for items or exp or just some good Role-Play But we need more signs or something on the big world maps that would point or say something like: Head 50 leagues North "to find something really cool" LvL 10-20. Or some other kind of road map... or even better, a world map that has locations or "MapMarks" that we can "pin" something on.

As it stands I printed out a colour copy of the Big World Map and am slowly adding markers to it to give me an idea of where things other than twons are :p

Well firstly bigworld is mostly empty. It was intentionally mostly empty because it is meant to be filled in with new stuff. If you go exploring in the wilderness right now you will likely find nothing because there is nothing there. Hopefully one day it will be jam packed so you can't even swing a cat without hitting an adventure, but at the current rate of map making that will be a while.

This is even further enunciated by having more than one starting position - hopefully one day you will be able to play an entirely different game by choosing Navar instead of Scorn as your starting postion.

Secondly because it is so empty the best strategy is to stick to the roads, major centers (most map work I'm doing right now involves filling in existing towns and areas - not making new ones), look for clues which will point you to hidden areas and keep a record of the places you find (your map and marker idea is great - that's how these games have traditionally worked you explore and keep a map - what fun is it if everything is listed for you?)

You are right - there should be more signs (I'll make some soon for the roads) and on top of this some of the quest information should be updated to reflect the migration to bigworld.

Oop!

Sorry didn't mean to come off seeming angry... Its just that most of the places I would go questing or for xp or just for fun - are not in any town

I will post map locations as I find things (towers, quests, etc...)

Is there a forum or mailing list for mapmakers? I've been working on some very simple ones so far... but I would like to hear suggestions or wants for maps and then see what I can come up with.


Incidentally... the Tower of Demonology is @ Location World/world_102_104

Go to Santo Dominion and check the 'who' listing to see your location, then go north up the road just outside Santo and continue north (even through the small amount of mountains...) until you hit map locale 102_104 the Tower should be just off to your left. (1500 gold entry fee)

RovinRogue wrote: Is there a forum or mailing list for mapmakers? I've been working on some very simple ones so far... but I would like to hear suggestions or wants for maps and then see what I can come up with.

Yep, there is..

http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/list ... sfire-maps

RovinRogue wrote: Incidentally... the Tower of Demonology is @ Location World/world_102_104

Go to Santo Dominion and check the 'who' listing to see your location, then go north up the road just outside Santo and continue north (even through the small amount of mountains...) until you hit map locale 102_104 the Tower should be just off to your left. (1500 gold entry fee)

IMO, compiling a list of coordinates for many of the world maps would be very helpful for map makers and map spoilers.

Using your example, knowing where the Tower of Demonology (_102_104) is located in relation to Santo Dominion (_95_104) would indicate it's straight north and not north by north east, etc. Kind of useful for NPC dialog as well.

If you do post map co-ordinates of things other than renowned landscape features please label them as Spoilers since many places should be harder to find than not. Cities and major features like the Ring mountains would be fine to post but I would hate to see a comprehensive list of the co-ordinates for all places great and small posted without a spoiler warning.

On this topic, it would be really great to come up with a nice in-game nomenclature or co-ordinate system (right now the maps go from 100_100 to 130_130 and the mapinfo command will give you this and the name but that seems rather ugly) and add a whole bunch of info (manually or automatically) to generate books and scrolls with the locations of places and things of interest. Crossfire has a great in-game book generating feature that isn't getting the use it deserves (this goes for monster lore too - the crossfire wiki hasn't really collected any fun lore to add as yet...)

It would have to be expandable and really should cover non 'world' maps as well. Also, a map file may for various reasons not really be a direct correlation with an actual location so maybe something to do with the map name or using a 'location tag' in the maplore field?

You are contemplating having books randomly appear that have a location description or some map coodinates or spoiler info?