Large world map...

dino · Post by **dino** » Wed Jun 02, 2004 11:59 am

I'm looking for a large world map of Black Gate. I'm aware of the one at http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~wpalenst/ultima/ but that one shows mountaintops... I'd prefer one that shows the dungeons. Can anyone help?

Post by **wjp** » Wed Jun 02, 2004 12:04 pm

I've got one of those as well

http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~wpalenst ... oroofs.png

ExultUser · Post by **ExultUser** » Wed Jun 02, 2004 4:25 pm

Another thing that would be cool would be a roof-less map that included the people (maybe in their initial positions or something) and maybe some monsters etc.

Not sure how difficult that would be to produce.

Andrea B Previtera · Post by **Andrea B Previtera** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 3:35 am

This is the most beautiful Ultima7-related thing I've ever seen

By the way, speaking of rooftops, I wonder if there would be a way to remove only the rooftop you're under, and not the other ones. I always felt strange when - entering a house - I could suddenly see the inside of the other surrounding houses as well.

I am trying to implement this in my rpg and I can see only two ways:
the explicit one (marking each rooftop element of a certain roof with a unique id)
or a "smart" one which tracks the adjacent rooftop elements do determine where the roof ends...

Post by **Dominus** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 3:43 am

smart one sounds better.

Andrea B Previtera · Post by **Andrea B Previtera** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 4:38 am

Smart one would be also applyable to Exult.
Now, on my particular engine it's quite a hell catching up the adjacent frames due to the nature of how the world data is organized... but you have to do that just when you step under a roof element, and when you step out of it.

Post by **drcode** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 8:20 am

The 'smart' method does sound good.

dino · Post by **dino** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 9:50 am

Thanks wjp! That map is perfect!

TMNM Dragon · Post by **TMNM Dragon** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 9:08 am

wjp: How did you generate that map, I would like to do the same for the mod I'm working on. My u7map and u7chunks are completely different, and my shapes.vga has had some shapes replaced.
It would help in the editing process.

Post by **wjp** » Fri Jun 04, 2004 10:07 am

Check the 'buildmap' command line option:

http://exult.info/docs.php#command_line

Angelo · Post by **Angelo** » Mon Aug 23, 2004 1:46 pm

Excelent map!

Would it be possible to get a map with the NPCs?

Achile · Post by **Achile** » Tue Aug 24, 2004 8:21 am

A map of SI with no roof too

Angelo · Post by **Angelo** » Tue Aug 24, 2004 10:57 am

You can find one here, although it's in low quality.

http://membres.lycos.fr/sergorn/ultima/ ... ndex.shtml

Achile · Post by **Achile** » Tue Aug 24, 2004 11:27 am

Without roof

Post by **Dominus** » Tue Aug 24, 2004 11:29 am

you know, if you get a little creative with the link posted by wjp, you might find what you are looking for...

Angelo · Post by **Angelo** » Tue Aug 24, 2004 2:48 pm

The problem is that it doesn't create a single map. It creates lots of PCX images. Is there a command to make it make a single map? If not, how can I join the files in a single one?

Post by **wjp** » Tue Aug 24, 2004 11:03 pm

Try ImageMagick's montage.

Post by **Dominus** » Wed Aug 25, 2004 12:27 am

actually I meant the link wjp gave in the 2nd post in this thread.

Angelo · Post by **Angelo** » Wed Aug 25, 2004 3:24 am

wjp: Gonna check it out.

Dominus: you mean this? http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~wpalenst ... /SImap.png

Angelo · Post by **Angelo** » Wed Aug 25, 2004 5:18 am

ImageMagicks is command line based.

Post by **wjp** » Wed Aug 25, 2004 5:27 am

yes of course. So?

Gradilla Dragon · Post by **Gradilla Dragon** » Wed Aug 25, 2004 6:40 am

RTFM

Post by **Dominus** » Wed Aug 25, 2004 9:09 am

Angelo: No, of course I meant
http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~wpalenst ... oroofs.png which is really just a slight correction of wjp's first answer.

Post by **wjp** » Wed Aug 25, 2004 9:20 am

Dominus: Angelo wasn't asking for SImap_noroofs; Achile was.

Post by **Dominus** » Wed Aug 25, 2004 9:33 am

ah, kind of hard to keep it all in order

Angelo · Post by **Angelo** » Wed Aug 25, 2004 1:00 pm

Read a complicated manual just to use the program once? Nah. I hate command lines. Although I still remember using DOS, years ago...

Post by **drcode** » Wed Aug 25, 2004 1:34 pm

Sometimes ImageMagick is the only practical way to do things. Suppose you have 4 images that you want to resize to 64x64 pixels. You could do those easily in a graphics program. Now suppose you have 100 images you want to resize.

Gradilla Dragon · Post by **Gradilla Dragon** » Wed Aug 25, 2004 3:40 pm

Don't cry and do your homework. Command-line is more than 100 times faster than graphical interface.

Bomb Bloke · Post by **Bomb Bloke** » Wed Aug 25, 2004 6:30 pm

That's an understatement. Oh, the joys of batch files...

Angelo · Post by **Angelo** » Thu Aug 26, 2004 3:45 am

I don't think so. It would be easier to add images I wanna join using a dialogue window, select all and execute, than writting 140+ ultima pcx names in the command line. For example.

About the batch files, I wonder if those map authors used this software and, if yes, if they use batch files (that could be sent to me

)...

Post by **wjp** » Thu Aug 26, 2004 4:06 am

> It would be easier to add images I wanna join using a dialogue window,
> select all and execute, than writting 140+ ultima pcx
> names in the command line.

That's what wildcards/globbing are/is for.

> About the batch files, I wonder if those map authors used
> this software and, if yes, if they use batch files (that could be sent to me

)...

Yes, I used montage (that's why I mentioned it). No, I didn't use a batch file. It's just one command after all.

Post by **artaxerxes** » Thu Aug 26, 2004 4:33 am

to give a concrete example, say you want to move every PNG file with name (before extension) ending with "_big" to a folder "Big", you would do:
$ mv *_big.png Big

Now tell me how you do that with GUI tools as fast as I would.
Note, this is not a rant about GUI. I'm just trying to show you it is worth using command line sometimes (or often or always depending on who you talk with)

Artaxerxes

Gradilla Dragon · Post by **Gradilla Dragon** » Thu Aug 26, 2004 4:45 am

or say you want to move all files ending with _aa, _ae and _af to a folder "stuff", you would do:
$ mv *_a[aef].png stuff

How do you do that with a GUI? If you ever can, is it faster?

Gerry · Post by **Gerry** » Thu Aug 26, 2004 4:46 am

Hi guys,

I think most of the stuff you've been describing could be done easily using the batch options included in Irfanview (which is a GUI-application).

It's a Windows app, yet it should run under Wine too.

Gerry

Angelo · Post by **Angelo** » Thu Aug 26, 2004 4:58 am

> Yes, I used montage (that's why I mentioned it). No, I didn't use a batch file. It's just one command after all.

It would be great if you could tell me what is that command.

About the Command Line vs GUI issue: that's right, there are things it's more practical doing with command lines than with a GUI, and vice-versa. So it depends on each one's needs. I, for example, won't ever need (or very rarely) to use the commands you discribed. It's very neat saying you can do this and that... But if I don't need that, why bother?

Sometimes knowing how to make batch files is useful (sometimes I do it to rename lots of files, to make backup-making batch files, etc). But in this case, there's only one task I need, and after that I won't need anymore. Is it just being lazy for not wanting to spend hours reading a manual and figuring out how to do it?

Gradilla Dragon · Post by **Gradilla Dragon** » Thu Aug 26, 2004 6:52 am

Don't be so lazy. You need it now, so learn how to do it. You have spent HOURS expecting someone to tell you how to do it, when you would have only spent MINUTES reading the manual and doing it yourself.

Post by **wjp** » Thu Aug 26, 2004 7:29 am

> So it depends on each one's needs.

That's very naive. Your so-called needs depend a lot on what you know you can do. The more tools you learn, the more you'll find you can use them to perform tasks you "need" to do, even if using them would never have occurred to you before.

Saying you don't want to learn how to use a tool just because you can't see many uses for it now sounds very short-sighted to me. But of course it's your decision to make.

Anyway, montage:

montage blue.png green.png red.png yellow.png -tile 2x2 -geometry +0+0 -borderwidth 0 m.png

That command tiles blue.png, green.png, red.png, yellow.png (the first filenames) into a 2x2 (the -tile bit) image with zero borders (borderwidth and geometry) called m.png (the last filename)

You can probably adjust it yourself to tile all 144 .pcx files into a single file. It does need a lot of memory, though, so if you plan to scale the map down afterwards, you might want to scale it down a bit before montage-ing them together.

Angelo · Post by **Angelo** » Thu Aug 26, 2004 8:44 am

Well, technically I didn't spent hours waiting, as I wasn't waiting doing nothing, I was occupied with other things. While reading the manual would be spending the time with something that won't be useful to me in the future.

wjp: thanks for the command. I guess that i have to substitute those filenames with ultima's (and the 2x2 thing too, I guess with 12x12?). Doubt: How can I know the software will put the images in the right order?

By the way, I have 512MB ram, can I make a montage in full scale, or I'll run ou of memory?

Post by **wjp** » Thu Aug 26, 2004 9:00 am

512mb probably isn't enough. It used up 1.5Gb of RAM and 10Gb of temp files here. It seems to be storing images in a 8 byte per pixel format internally. Maybe colourspace related. I could try experimenting a bit to see if a different target colourspace works with less memory.

Order: you have to specify the images in the right order. That's u7map00.pcx, u7map10.pcx, u7map20.pcx, ..., u7mapb0.pcx, u7map01.pcx, u7map02.pcx, ..., u7mapb2.pcx, ..., u7map0b.pcx. ... u7mapbb.pcx. In bash that could be done with

u7map[0-9ab]{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,a,b}.pcx

but I'm not sure how the windows shell handles wildcard expansion. (Or you could rename the files to make the order more logical.)

Oh, the geometry option may have to be -geometry 2048x2048+0+0, by the way. (Otherwise the tiles might get scaled down to the default 120x120 pixels).