The Dink Network

Map Development Hardest Part of Dmod

August 11th 2005, 11:58 AM
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igloo15
Peasant He/Him
 
I am currently working on my 3rd try at a dmod and each and everytime the dmod fail to be completed because of the time it takes to make the map look good and exciting. This is the hardest part of making a dmod in my opinion. What if any tips do people have about making maps for Dmods. Maybe I am missing something that makes it easy.
August 11th 2005, 12:20 PM
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Striker
Noble She/Her United States
Daniel, there are clowns. 
Well, one major thing is to draw your map ahead of time on a piece of paper. This allows you to make a draft that you can quickly change. Once you've drawn something to your liking, you can use it as a guideline for your Dinkedit map. This should speed things up significantly and allow you more time to add little details, like grass, rocks, vines, etc.
August 11th 2005, 01:13 PM
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Yes, have plenty details. Details give the map it's personality.

And do lots of curves or it will look too linear.
August 11th 2005, 01:58 PM
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Find a quick way to make houses have the right hardness, using tiles or a program.

Copying screens is also a decent idea. I have one "blank" house interior screen, with only the background and walls. Then, when I want to do a house interior, I just copy it to another screen and put crap on that.

Don't work for your scripts, let your scripts work for you! Instead of individually placing 30 carrots to make a farm, create a script that will draw them for you. Instead of putting nuts on trees one by one, have the trees' scripts draw the nuts. This also lets you change or delete the script-created objects without having to change visions--a major concern if you have trouble staying under 100 sprites.

If you want an area to be covered in bushes and mushrooms, cover all the screens in mushrooms first, then cover them all in bushes; this is a lot faster than going screen by screen, and doing both at once, mainly because switching sprites takes a relatively long time, even on newer machines.

Finally (whew!) remember that small is good. People don't always like to wander around a huge, boring map; usually, they prefer a smaller, more detailed, one.
August 11th 2005, 02:46 PM
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Simeon
Peasant He/Him Netherlands
Any fool can use a computer. Many do. 
@MiloBones: Hmm, I dunno.. I don't think the average starting D-Mod author has the knowledge to create scripts to automatically create and position the nuts for a tree; some are happy when they can let two people have a conversation and they don't use all the commands the engine has. And for placing sprites (like your carrot example), wouldn't it be easier to simply check the depth dot the carrots should have and (S)tamp away? - a dozen carrots quickly

@igloo15: You have to decide what you want to create like a village, a cave or whatever and then think of the things you'd expect to be there (some also story-related). For example, in a town you'd expect a few houses, one or more shops, other important buildings (like mayor's house, town hall, military buildings). Some of these might be story-related too (i.e. they're there because you needed such building in your story). Then you should create a network of paths to guide the player where he can find all the buildings. Then you decorate these screens with boxes, grass, rocks, flowers, trees, bushes, objects, anything that you could find there.

And if you still have screens without decoration, you can add things like a well, a sign or other story-related decoration (holes, rubbish in case something has happened there). And don't forget, sometimes less is more - like MiloBones said, you can create large areas for the player to wander (like areas in the original adventure) but you can also limit the area by only creating what is needed while still keeping the ability to explore.
August 12th 2005, 01:16 AM
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I don't think the average starting D-Mod author has the knowledge to create scripts to automatically create and position the nuts for a tree

Good point.

[/i]And for placing sprites (like your carrot example), wouldn't it be easier to simply check the depth dot the carrots should have and (S)tamp away? - a dozen carrots quickly[/i]

Let's say you're writing a program in C, and you want a certain block of code to run five times in a row. The quickest way to do this is to copy the code and paste it four times; that's only 10 keystrokes or something. Would you actually do that? Probably not. You might put a version of the code block into a function, and then run that function from a for loop. That way if you had to change the code block, or the number of times it was run, or where it was used, you could do it easily.

Actually, I don't really know how you program... but the analogy is probably clear.

My rule is "thou shalt only spam background sprites!" I don't always follow this though .
August 12th 2005, 01:33 AM
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metatarasal
Bard He/Him Netherlands
I object 
Personally I found two ways of making a map for a DMOD. The first one is the one I used when creating Quest for the Gems. I decided what I would want the player to do on certain areas and then build the map. (Or rather my little brother thought out the story because I suffer from a severe lack of ideas.) This method gives small maps wich are pretty practical decorated, they're also quite quickly to build because of their size. Another advantage of this method is that you can do your map piece by piece. So if you don't like mapmaking you could make one piece of the map, start scripting, and then make another piece of the map and so on. This provides for more variation during the making of the DMOD.

This method has two problems though... The first is that I had problems making the map feel like it is one world. This is not a very serious problem because most of the time it doesn't have to feel like one world. The second problem is that I often made only the minimum neccessary. This made that everybody had some kind of function in the story rather then be real person who helps you out. For some reason I found those two things missing in Quest for the Gems. (I don't know about you, but this is my experience.)

So for my new DMODs I use the same strategy but a lot larger. Now I create quite a large world at once, this creates better pieces of wilderness. I use Striker's method of drawing the map on paper and then in the mapeditor. I do use a fasing system in this method too. Because in these type of maps I create the hard parts (the ones with hardness, not the ones hard to make) the tiles and the houses first. Then I can do some scripting if I like and then I can do vegetation, enemies and so on.

So for me the secret formulary is: 'variation' Mapmaking and no scripting for some period can be quite boring and vice versa.
August 12th 2005, 01:55 AM
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For the record, Simeon is King when it comes to mapping (OiaL especially.)
August 12th 2005, 07:00 AM
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Simeon
Peasant He/Him Netherlands
Any fool can use a computer. Many do. 
@MiloBones:
Let's say you're writing a program in C ... but the analogy is probably clear

Ah yeah, but that's certainly true for programming a program. It's just that when I thought about it, it would seem so much work for mapdecoration as you'd have to set all the carrots' coordinates through a script. For small bits of code that are used often, it's useful but a carrot-farm as decoration doesn't appear that much in a D-Mod unless it's "Dink Smallwood and the Carrot-Farm". I get your point though

@igloo15:
True, I tend to do some mapping, then some scripting and then some mapping again - usually the areas that I just created. The downside is that when I more feel like mapping, I create various areas and my scripting of them is lacking i.e. several areas without scripting. And then it can get boring because you have ideas for coming areas but you still need to do earlier parts. As a result, my current D-Mod (which I haven't done much about recently ), has been scripted up to the point where 'the map is' but in the places where the player has several choices, I've only done 1 or 2 and I'll have to do the other options later because I don't feel like doing them now
August 12th 2005, 03:41 PM
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ehasl
Peasant He/Him
 
Simeon.. The carrots can have random coordinates within specified borders.

Anyway, would it be a simple job to make a random map generator for Dink? I know some newbies would then make enormous, empty D-Mods, but I think of it as just something to start with for an author without ideas. You could specify how many squares you want, number of large and small islands, amount of water and other terrain types... number of cities and people and monsters. Most stuff could be automatically generated, then properly scripted and polished.
August 12th 2005, 03:53 PM
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metatarasal
Bard He/Him Netherlands
I object 
Wouldn't really help for me. Since I mostly want a practical map and not a randomly generated map. This is because I always want to let the player experience some difficulty in getting around. So I have to do some specific hardmapping. This requires some thinking beforehand, wich a random map generator can't.