daoc maps

Created by ceej. Last edited by ceej Fri, 13 Jun 2003 18:35:50 PDT. Viewed 22690 times. atom feed

I became dissatisfied with the information design and appearance of existing DaoC maps. I created my own. Some design goals were:

  • readability
  • correct spelling
  • simplicity
  • presentation of all the information needed by a player in-game (mob locations, quest locations, important landmarks)
  • accurate landscape

See Tufte for some more goals.

Accurate landscape is easy to achieve, thanks to the existence of a tool that extracts map data from the DAoC client data. Some maps over-ornament the landscape, however. Maps shouldn't be too photo-realistic. You need some simplification and abstraction.

Adding mob locations takes the longest. I have been unhappy with the accuracy of some of the mob loc data I've seen on other maps. So I don't rely on other maps when I can avoid it. I run one of my own characters around the map on my PC while I run Photoshop on my TiBook. (I prefer to run my bard and minstrel around. That speed song really helps.) Unfortunately, my highest level character is 26 in Albion and 24 in Hibernia, and I don't play Midgard at all. So the mob loc data isn't as good as it could be.

my DAoC maps
tools for running the mapper
DAoC mapper source

Mapper is in Python with a small C component.

Lexicon : Fri, 16 Jan 2004 14:23:48 PST permalink
How far did you get with decoding the new NIF format? I'm wondering if it changed again with Atlantis. I'm interested in getting this to work again but I don't have a clue on where to start with decoding these files.
ceej : Fri, 16 Jan 2004 15:05:19 PST permalink
Not very far. Oliver told me that he'd gotten about halfway done with the problem. Reverse-engineering a 3d model file format is not an easy task. Especially for somebody like me, who doesn't know much about existing 3d model file formats.
Lexicon : Fri, 23 Jan 2004 15:42:52 PST permalink
Interesting... I found a French website today that has a modified mapper that works with SI and TOA. There were a couple of hurdles though. First, when I ran zonelist it would fail in the ConfigParser because of some garbage in the zones.mpk (TOA) config file. I replaced all the imports to use Willoughby's MapperGUI datParser replacement for ConfigParser. Second, I had to download the readdxt utility. It converts .dds files to .tga files and is a part of the DXT_TOOLS. Once I dropped that into the bin folder it worked like a charm. I thought you might want to know about this in case you wanted to update your source. Here is the web site: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/isabelle.marmont/
Madycrazy : Mon, 01 Mar 2004 05:06:17 PST permalink
Hi

I download all files you listen in your posts.

But all trys to installed in the right folders failed.

Can someone of you give me the correct file folders so i can make maps from toa and si ?

Madycrazy

(Sorry for my bad english :) )

Oecken : Fri, 09 Jul 2004 03:03:42 PDT permalink
Hi Ceej,

I'm a German programmer of Internetsites and my next project is a MapSystem for DAOC-Europe.

I love the maps u made, and I want to ask you, wheather u have these maps without any type of descriptions and LOCs for me.

I will paste the copyright to each map. Please help, noone else I asked want to help me :( (include Mythic-Europe) My E-Mail: oecken(at)gmx(dot)de

Bye and thanks

Register or log in to post a comment.