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stevefox74

Maps and Cartography Skill

Approval of this suggestion   13 members have voted

  1. 1. Do you like this suggestion on maps?

    • Yes!
      10
    • No.
      3

Please sign in or register to vote in this poll.

16 posts in this topic

Maps - Cartography

 

Underlined text shows new edited content.

 

As of now, maps are not available.

I'm not sure why but they would prove to be quite the tool for adventurers.

 

Hence, maps.

The way it works will be similar to vanilla, opening it up and begin carving your map with many major tweaks to it.

A new skill will be introduced to suit the maps and ability to create maps.

 

Crafting and Enlarging Maps

Maps in TerrafirmaCraft will use a different recipe.

 

Placing 9 papers in your 3x3 crafting grid will give you a parchment which when used, will show up in your hand similar to how vanilla map works.

Similar to vanilla maps, you can surround your map with papers to enlarge it. After your first enlargement, you can no longer look at your map from your hands; instead, are required to place it down on any ground to look at it. You can only enlarge your map 3 times as opposed to 4 times in Vanilla Minecraft, at which the map will appear to take the size of a full block surface when placed on ground. You can right-click the map to pick it up immediately.

 

Maps have the same block coverage as Vanilla Maps, meaning an un-enlarged map can cover 128x128 blocks and can be enlarged multiple times to cover 256x256 blocks, 512x512 blocks and finally 1024x1024 blocks at maximum size.

Maps can be carved at different scales based on players' choice. Adventure and Exploration is a big part of this mod, even in beta stage, there is so much to explore. When you first open your parchment, a menu appears for you to choose your scales. As an example, a map has 128x128 pixels. You can choose scales ranging 1 pixel : 4 blocks, 1 pixel : 8 blocks and 1 pixel : 16 block. In any case you want larger sizes, that's where the enlargement comes in as explained above.

 

An enlargement simply doubles the scale of your map.

 

(More will be added such as using different materials that may result in different sizes or creating maps in different scales and enlarged at different rates.)

 

Creating your Maps

Maps will not automatically be recorded and you need to manually carve your surroundings. When you begin carving, it will always start at the center so be mindful at where you begin carving. Making maps are not free; you can either use charcoal, coal, ink sac and any colored dyes. 

 

To begin carving, simply hold your map and hold right-click (default button for 'Use Item). You will start carving in the map based on which direction you are looking; if you are facing north while carving the map, you will only carve the north from where you stand. If there are no obstacles from your viewpoint, you can carve large distances. Carving further distances from your map will take longer so it is sometimes better to just move into the area and continue carving from there.

 

Using only charcoal/coal/ink sac/black dye/any dark-colored dye, you will only carve your map in gray-scale. Your map will have different shades of black to represent different blocks or land. This includes but are not limited to Farmland, Crops, Forest, Stone, Ravines, Oceans and even Beds, Forges, Blast Furnaces and others.

 

You can carve a map at twice the speed using a quill, crafted with an ink sac and feather. A quill needs to be constantly refilled with ink sacs.

 

You can always erase your whole map by throwing it in water and pick it back up again and dry it in a firepit. Maps are not immediately erased when thrown in water. A fully carved un-enlarged map takes 5 seconds to fully erase its whole map. If picked up before it erases, the map will appear blurred and recarving may need to be done.

 

I want maps to be able to create maps for underground purposes but I'm totally unsure how computer coding will work that out. >->"

 

Coloring and creating custom keys for Maps

 

Coloring maps will be a bit special here for some realism believability. To begin coloring your map, you need your dyes obviously and a solid surface (wood, smooth stone etc) to work on. One dye of any color covers 32 blocks completely in a square and partially outwards from there so you'd need 4 dyes of all colors to fully color an un-enlarged map to its full prime. An unenlarged map takes 8 dyes to be fully coloured in a single colour. Multiple dyes are needed for a full colored map with no enlargements.

 

If enlargement takes place after coloring, more coloring will need to be done. Additional enlargements will always take 8 more dyes each of any one color. Different variants of colors work the same, such as light blue, blue and dark blue all work as blue, if they exist. Orange can substitute as both yellow or red; purple as both green or blue; brown as black and etc.

 

Place your map on a solid surface by sneaking and using the map on the solid surface. You'll place the map which you can then access by sneaking and right-clicking it. A GUI will appear with your map and several inventory slots to your right where you place your dyes and quill if you have one. There is also a slot at the bottom at which you place a paper on. This is where you create the key for your map. You can draw your own symbols or use preset ones and place them on the map. The paper with the key for your map will automatically be attached to your map and may be removed anytime by placing the map on a solid surface and removing the paper. The key is saved on the paper however and be placed back once again.

 

When working on your map in the GUI, you can color the map by ticking a color mode box and tapping the map with your mouse to apply color. Respective dyes are automatically consumed for respective blocks (such as all green dyes will be used mainly for forest and grasslands). The dyes in use will have a durability meter to show how much left can the dye be used for coloring in the map before a new one must be replaced.

 

After coloring your map, it must be left settled in the solid surface for around half an hour for it to dry so you can pick it up afterwards.

 

Updating Maps

Maps do not update by themselves, you will need to carve your map constantly if you want up-do-date pictures.

Updating maps do not take resources. Colored maps to not need to be recolored.

 

Cloning Maps

Requirements to clone maps are simply another map and some black ink or charcoal.

 

The map that you want to clone must be placed on a solid surface. Hold the parchment you want to clone your map onto and hold right click it onto the map you want to clone. The time it takes to clone the map depends on how well furnished the map you want to clone is. Fully colored maps take only 1/8 of the time to be cloned in gray-scale as opposed to cloning a map that is only in gray-scale. You will need to hold your right-click for as long as several in-game hours to clone a map. 

 

Cloning is now instantaneous to suit multiplayer playstyle.

You cannot directly clone and color a map simultaneously. You can only clone the map in gray-scale, which you must place down afterwards to be colored.

 

Cartography

Cartography is the skill to create maps, simply said.

 

At high levels or skill mastery, a cartographer can carve and faster speeds, longer range, larger radius and make efficient use of dyes.

 

To put into perspective, mastering cartographing allows you to :

Carve and clone maps in gray-scale at around 3x the speed.

Carve at up to double the normal range.

Carve at up to double the radius of what you see.

Color maps using as little as only 1/4 dyes of what you normally use.

 

I felt like I am missing something in my suggestion. If you feel there is anything missing in my suggestion, please feel free to tell me. Also, feel free to leave any feedback on my idea if you like it!

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1024x1024 in TFC is nothing

 

For practicle reasons, you would want larger maps than you would in vanilla

 

I also noticed no mention whether or not your map would be functional if you are underground. This seems to be a important omission.

 

And as a warning, most players here use map mods, so your suggestion is irrelevant to most players here. There is a minority that considers map mods cheating, but its unlikely your suggestion will get much praise for this reason.

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Wow, dude. Let's start with what I like about this idea. Primarily, since TFC is a lot about exploration, I think it would be great to have in-game maps more a part of the game. I use a minimap mod, but I feel like it's pretty cheaty, so yeah, something interactive and more along the lines of TFC progression than the vanilla maps would be great to have in the game.

 

But, again, wow. That's a lot of complication for just making maps. I think the amount of work to develop that system would be a total waste because the vast majority of players would just say "forget it" and either use a minimap or do what I used to do - draw IRL maps. I really like what you're trying to do with this suggestion, but the mechanic doesn't seem like it would be fun enough to justify the efforts.

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Uhm... unless i am mistaken, you can craft minecraft maps in TFC using wrought iron ingots, redstone and paper and the like.

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And as a warning, most players here use map mods, so your suggestion is irrelevant to most players here. There is a minority that considers map mods cheating, but its unlikely your suggestion will get much praise for this reason.

I am using a map mod and consider it as cheating. However without a map it is quite impossible to keep an overview over all the ore deposits (except maybe a lot of signs) so I would really like to see a map from TFC that supports waypoints.

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The idea is pretty interesting, but so complex it deserves a mod pn its own, becouse it would fit in vanilla as well IMHO.

BUT as others said the amount of tedium it adds to a game would make maps useless for most people. And map scribing seems like a lot of work to implement properly.

All in all interesting idea, but me thinks it's next to impossible for this to get into stock TFC. And it should me fine-tuned to be less tedious, otherwise I fot obe would not use it even though I like the general idea of more believable in game maps.

But the amount of detail in this suggestion... Just WOW.

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"If there are no obstacles from your viewpoint, you can carve large distances. Carving further distances from your map will take longer so it is sometimes better to just move into the area and continue carving from there."

 

So you want to make it so that when you try to carve a map, the game examines which blocks you can currently see, and updates your map accordingly? Unless you hack into the rendering pipeline (which the vanilla minecraft code isn't going to let you do), I don't see a simple way of doing this code wise. If you had to recompute all the visible blocks whenever you start carving the map, the lag is going to be enormous. Also, I'm not sure how you're turning blocks you can see from your camera view into what the terrain looks like in top down view. Take an arch. You can see many blocks in the bow of the arch that shouldn't actually appear on your map, since they are not on top. Also, unless you are looking at it from the top, a lot of the data you retrieve will be useless; the bottom of a cliff tells you nothing about the land above it.

 

I really like the idea of adding better maps in game, and breaking our reliance on cheaty map mods (which I still use, despite thinking it's cheating). I like how much detail you've put into your suggestion. I'm concerned with the coding implimentation of this idea, since computing visibility is going to be very computationally expensive compared to vanilla's top down polling of blocks (Which is already a little slow. Just open a fresh map in vanilla and watch as it slowly fills in the pixels).

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I don't want to use map mods with overviews, but I would really like maps for exploring. I think really basic maps would suit the game nicely, just to fill in what is land and what is water, perhaps in a plain hand-drawn style rather than pixel perfect satellite imagery. Rather than capture all the shades of grass and rocks, it could just have an average greeny-browny shade based on the biome. I think players should rely on signs and beacons for remembering where deposits are regarding waypoints for a natural TFC experience, but there's always the option for magical sat-nav mods for other players.

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… I would really like to see a map from TFC that supports waypoints.

 

Vanilla maps support untitled waypoints. If you place a vanilla map in an item frame it will create a waypoint in any copy of the map that was placed. Seems to work in TFC (creative test only).

That's not great waypoint support -- you'll need eight paper, four wrought iron ingots, one redstone, one leather, and eight sticks for every waypoint -- but it's something.

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I tend to agree, I even suggest the same thing.http://terrafirmacraft.com/f/topic/6709-integrated-map/

Uh.. okay.. oh dear, I honestly did not see that in the Suggestions Directory. Sorry for suggesting the same idea! 

 

 

1024x1024 in TFC is nothing

 

For practicle reasons, you would want larger maps than you would in vanilla

 

I also noticed no mention whether or not your map would be functional if you are underground. This seems to be a important omission.

 

And as a warning, most players here use map mods, so your suggestion is irrelevant to most players here. There is a minority that considers map mods cheating, but its unlikely your suggestion will get much praise for this reason.

Ah.. really? I never wander too far off my spawn since I have a lot nearby. Still a beginner so sorry hehe..

Okay I've got an idea, what if instead of working too similar like vanilla, we could set the scale we want to draw our maps individually.

 

By default, maps have a 128x128 pixels. What if we could start out the map with different scaling such as 1 pixel covering 16 blocks, hence covering 1028x1028 without enlargements.

This would allow small maps covering enormously large areas. The keys used in larger maps will be adjusted in size to fit the scale (smaller when the scale becomes larger).

 

 

"If there are no obstacles from your viewpoint, you can carve large distances. Carving further distances from your map will take longer so it is sometimes better to just move into the area and continue carving from there."

 

So you want to make it so that when you try to carve a map, the game examines which blocks you can currently see, and updates your map accordingly? Unless you hack into the rendering pipeline (which the vanilla minecraft code isn't going to let you do), I don't see a simple way of doing this code wise. If you had to recompute all the visible blocks whenever you start carving the map, the lag is going to be enormous. Also, I'm not sure how you're turning blocks you can see from your camera view into what the terrain looks like in top down view. Take an arch. You can see many blocks in the bow of the arch that shouldn't actually appear on your map, since they are not on top. Also, unless you are looking at it from the top, a lot of the data you retrieve will be useless; the bottom of a cliff tells you nothing about the land above it.

 

I really like the idea of adding better maps in game, and breaking our reliance on cheaty map mods (which I still use, despite thinking it's cheating). I like how much detail you've put into your suggestion. I'm concerned with the coding implimentation of this idea, since computing visibility is going to be very computationally expensive compared to vanilla's top down polling of blocks (Which is already a little slow. Just open a fresh map in vanilla and watch as it slowly fills in the pixels).

I'm not a coding expert so uh.. darn, what a bummer.

Perhaps we can dump away the obstacle things and just allow carving maps through obstacles. I believe there aren't much obstacles aside from trees and mountains, and carving through those wouldn't hurt much experience.

 

 

Wow, dude. Let's start with what I like about this idea. Primarily, since TFC is a lot about exploration, I think it would be great to have in-game maps more a part of the game. I use a minimap mod, but I feel like it's pretty cheaty, so yeah, something interactive and more along the lines of TFC progression than the vanilla maps would be great to have in the game.

 

But, again, wow. That's a lot of complication for just making maps. I think the amount of work to develop that system would be a total waste because the vast majority of players would just say "forget it" and either use a minimap or do what I used to do - draw IRL maps. I really like what you're trying to do with this suggestion, but the mechanic doesn't seem like it would be fun enough to justify the efforts.

Oh darn, was it that complicated?

I actually thought it was a simple system in my head.

I'm gonna leave this post here for more debates and opinions.

 

1024x1024 in TFC is nothing

 

For practicle reasons, you would want larger maps than you would in vanilla

 

I also noticed no mention whether or not your map would be functional if you are underground. This seems to be a important omission.

 

And as a warning, most players here use map mods, so your suggestion is irrelevant to most players here. There is a minority that considers map mods cheating, but its unlikely your suggestion will get much praise for this reason.

Well, I'd like underground mapping to be a thing. Sounds nice to have. I'll work on my main post soon to update on underground mapping.

It is only now I know that the majority uses map mods, thanks for telling me. I understand but I will still stand strong with my idea.

With hopes this suggestion reaches out to people, players may give up on map mods and utilize the maps provided within TFC itself.

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I suppose if you abstract visability to mean a cone of blocks (or chunks) eminating from the player in the direction the player looking, it wouldn't truely be every block you can see, but would give a decent illusion of it. Most importantly, it would be way cheaper to do. You might then be able to add a simple viewing angle vs maximum block height in that chunk.

 

Posted Image

Paint level = 9001.

But in summary, you could simply take a cone from the player's position and say "these chunks the player can see". Then you find the maximum block height in those chunks (Could cheat and take the height at a certain block) and calculate if it is within the view volume using the visibility angle (which I'm pretty sure is constant no matter what angle you're actually looking at). If you have a chunk that has a block above that maximum height, you exclude the chunks behind it. This would open you up to issues with floating islands, but could simulate the idea you had planned originally.

 

The plus side of this is that while it might takea little bit more time to compute than vanilla maps, if you draw it in real time (as soon as the calculation is done for a chunk, draw it on the map) it'll simply look like the player is drawing the map from what's closest to what is furthest. Of course, I'm sure in actual implimentation there are shortcuts/pitfalls to work out, but I think the general idea might work.

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Uh.. okay.. oh dear, I honestly did not see that in the Suggestions Directory. Sorry for suggesting the same idea!

 

Never mind ! Don't worry.

 

What you propose requires a ray tracing.It is quite hard to code, but it is not impossible.A piece of advice : you must do this by simple step.1 - add a new crafting for minecraft map.2 - add a new Enlarging method.4 - add waypoint feature.etc...That way there is a chance that this map see the day.

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I've updated my suggestion with new things I gathered from feedback and also some of my own.

I familiarized myself more with the suggestion rules and tweak my map cloning function to suit multiplayer purposes.

 

 

Never mind ! Don't worry.

 

What you propose requires a ray tracing.
It is quite hard to code, but it is not impossible.

A piece of advice : you must do this by simple step.

1 - add a new crafting for minecraft map.
2 - add a new Enlarging method.
4 - add waypoint feature.
etc...

That way there is a chance that this map see the day.

What do you mean by a new crafting and a new enlarging method?

Do you mean by a new crafting recipe unique from the vanilla method?

 

Is my parchment recipe using 9 papers no good? I personally like it. I'm not sure what's wrong with it. And adding a new enlarging method might overcomplicate things but I'll definitely look into it.

And there is already a waypoint feature, using the keys. Placing your map down can allow you to edit the map with your own symbols which you can easily refer.

 

 

I suppose if you abstract visability to mean a cone of blocks (or chunks) eminating from the player in the direction the player looking, it wouldn't truely be every block you can see, but would give a decent illusion of it. Most importantly, it would be way cheaper to do. You might then be able to add a simple viewing angle vs maximum block height in that chunk.

 

Posted Image

Paint level = 9001.

But in summary, you could simply take a cone from the player's position and say "these chunks the player can see". Then you find the maximum block height in those chunks (Could cheat and take the height at a certain block) and calculate if it is within the view volume using the visibility angle (which I'm pretty sure is constant no matter what angle you're actually looking at). If you have a chunk that has a block above that maximum height, you exclude the chunks behind it. This would open you up to issues with floating islands, but could simulate the idea you had planned originally.

 

The plus side of this is that while it might takea little bit more time to compute than vanilla maps, if you draw it in real time (as soon as the calculation is done for a chunk, draw it on the map) it'll simply look like the player is drawing the map from what's closest to what is furthest. Of course, I'm sure in actual implimentation there are shortcuts/pitfalls to work out, but I think the general idea might work.

This is actually quite interesting. This would work well with the concept of 'getting to a high point to get a clear view of the surroundings for better mapping'.

Thanks for telling me this! :D

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I misspoke.Your proposal are good, I do not suggest you change them.But cut them into several stage, easy to code.Step one:Keep minecraft map by default, but change the crafting recipe.8 papers + 1 bousole -> 9 papersStep two :What you wantDo not scare the developer with feature too complicated.

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Honestly, I think what people want out of map mods is waypoints more than anything else. Take a look at season 3 of Terrafirmacrack as an example. I think it might be easier to have the 'map' not actually be a map at all but just an item which you can upgrade with 'pins' or 'markers'. You would have to use an anvil to make these pins and markers, I guess out of iron, and that would allow you to set waypoints- one per pin. With dyes, you could add more colour variety when choosing waypoints. And just to make sure it isn't *too* easy, you wouldn't be able to name waypoints. Then the waypoints would be tied to a physical item in the game, which you could copy and give to a friend, or which an enemy could steal from your corpse... this is my favoured way of any future map implementation.

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