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Exactly.


 


Many of those are modern (a relative term) maps of the medieval world.  If you start to look at the period created maps( such as this one hosted by UCLA and brought up in your search above : http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/images/romani_map_02.jpg), most of them have general, non exacting layouts with general POI's marked (MAJOR terrain features, and LARGE towns...which the OP clearly has in its graphic).  Only the ones of town layouts have roads and other detailed specifics.


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Exactly.

 

Many of those are modern (a relative term) maps of the medieval world.  If you start to look at the period created maps( such as this one hosted by UCLA and brought up in your search above : http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/images/romani_map_02.jpg), most of them have general, non exacting layouts with general POI's marked (MAJOR terrain features, and LARGE towns...which the OP clearly has in its graphic).  Only the ones of town layouts have roads and other detailed specifics.

 

Not a reproduction:

 

Scanned maps: http://umedia.lib.umn.edu/taxonomy/term/712

 

c.1450 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FraMauroDetailedMap.jpg

 

or

 

c.1300's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hereford_Mappa_Mundi_1300.jpg

 

More information about said map:

 

My point remains, compare this:

Independence_006_poi.png

 

to this:

 

530px-Hereford_Mappa_Mundi_1300.jpg

 

If you have no basis of relation, neither map helps and new players do not have that relation.  Even Indy has periods where there are few folks watching chat, or that don't want to be bothered so ignore chat, what about on smaller servers that have even less players (gawds forbid on some of the Epic servers, where there have been times with populations in the single digits online at really slow points).

 

Most "low details" maps were references only, as in to show a general location in relation to where you where (such as in a school) not meant for navigation.  The navigation maps with the highest accurate/current details could cost as much or more than the ships that used them to sail by.

 

::Edit insert::  Again not knocking the art team, they are truly delivering with the images/content, I just ask that if maps are seriously being considered for new players, that they be useful for new players.

 

Because if it is more useful to still refer people to the community map, this feature becomes the new spoon in Wurm.

Edited by Hussars
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Exactly.

 

Many of those are modern (a relative term) maps of the medieval world.  If you start to look at the period created maps( such as this one hosted by UCLA and brought up in your search above : http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/images/romani_map_02.jpg), most of them have general, non exacting layouts with general POI's marked (MAJOR terrain features, and LARGE towns...which the OP clearly has in its graphic).  Only the ones of town layouts have roads and other detailed specifics.

If you use a big image, and bother to zoom in, you'll notice that its riddled with wording...

And the one i linked dates from 1539, which is roughly 100 years after Portuguese started using Caravels, so not too modern for Wurm.

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That one has too much artsy fluff to be really useful, it was probably a decoration piece as well.


 


But look at the medieval scans that Hussars linked: mostly blank canvas with regions and town names, roads, rivers, lakes and the occasional iconography marking major mountains and forests.


 


Anyway, the map looks amazing, just the markers are totally out of place. And yes independence and chaos need twice as much zoom as the other maps.


Edited by Keldun

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Actually, most of those "blank canvas maps" on the first page of the first link are 18th to 20th century.


You can tell they are "modern" maps, because the continents actually have the correct configuration. Medieval maps were made by cartographers surveying the coast on a ship, so there's distortion on the dimensions, and some areas are simply incorrect, because they weren't very explored.


 


Actually on Wurm, the most medieval-like maps are the early no-dump maps like this:



Independence.png



Edited by ReaverKane

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That one has too much artsy fluff to be really useful, it was probably a decoration piece as well.

 

But look at the medieval scans that Hussars linked: mostly blank canvas with regions and town names, roads, rivers, lakes and the occasional iconography marking major mountains and forests.

 

Anyway, the map looks amazing, just the markers are totally out of place. And yes independence and chaos need twice as much zoom as the other maps.

 

The map styles vary from artist and use, a navigation map like here:

nautical-map-of-mediterranean-sea-in-14t

 

Won't show much interior detail because it's meant for ocean navigation.  The "fancy fluff" map was actually a folded map, so it could have been anything from a church or nobleman's map to a rich sea captain's map (given the detail, more likely the former rather than the latter, but I've not read up on that specific one.)

 

Another sample of a 15th century navigational map:

2.jpg

 

It's argued that before the very early 15th century, most cartographers were not aware of, or at least including, continental shapes on general maps.  The one above is considered uncommon for its time because of the continental details.  (Original Map is by Piri Rei)

 

 ::Edit Insert::  The story on the map actually has Piri claiming he drew the map based off of up to 20 different maps from Alexander the Great. ::/edit:: 

 

It seems we've gone from discussing the maps to be included, to discussion on Map and Cartography history lol.

 

Coming back to my original point.  Being a new player in Wurm, and seeing the world for the first time, is like being from a time before the Americas were mapped (or even common knowledge) and being dropped in the middle of Arkansas with a map that only shows the US from orbit.

Edited by Hussars
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ok so first things first.....they have already decided what they want to do and aren't going to waste the time and resources they put into this by scrapping the project and starting over without at least a test run, so get ready to see this ...like, love, or hate it

 

Now here comes the real mindblower..... Wurm is a medieval themed game, thus the map looks like early medieval maps only more visually appealing....   :o SHOCKING I know!  imagine an art department that sticks to game theme-ing. 

 

I could care less either way... I learned to play without a map, then learned of the community map project afterwards and use it to locate deeds.  If they think it will help new players and increase Wurm's player base then have at it.

This is a prime example of why I wish Wurm had more dev's whose attitude could be explain as a humble code monkey compare to the all mighty, all seeing, all knowing, never be wrong, my way or the highway type dev.

A simple thread detailing plans and letting people discuss things would have been better. As the thread progress you adapt plans to various points. Finally go forth to draw and code. Starting to draw and code before you have even a remote idea of how maps are actually used is backwards.

 

 

Nerisrath....it's a ---FACT--- that Wurm has both realistic medieval and fictional fantasy elements. Its not unreasonable for fictional fantasy world to have means to make accurate maps.

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so is this gonna be just another forum map, or is this something we will see in game and have to pull up with the compass and actually navigate with??


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It'll be ingame.


About topographic maps: it's all about logic, I can't really stand how one couldn't read it. It's clearly logical, you have the numbers, you should know what they mean.


When I first saw a topographic map, I just knew how to use it. Because it's simple.


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It'll be ingame.

About topographic maps: it's all about logic, I can't really stand how one couldn't read it. It's clearly logical, you have the numbers, you should know what they mean.

When I first saw a topographic map, I just knew how to use it. Because it's simple.

I'd like you to tell me how do you find your way from Town A to Town B on a map without town names (which is what Wurm map is and what a simple topographical chart with nothing but isolines and altitude markers). And wurm's map isn't even a topographical chart, its more like a aerial photograph than anything.

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Why is my old deed a point of interest :D


 


Back to topic:


 


Great work well done :)


Edited by Sklo:D

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The devs must be doing something right. There has been no one single argument of why these maps are bad, so they've at least avoided that trap. It will take actual implementation to see how well they hold up in the actual game, but I do have a few thoughts.


 


Community maps are great, but are not standardized, and require new players to trust older players with good url links. Even among older players, all it takes is one bad link to sour their experience on community maps. They are not the ultimate solution, nor should the devs feel like they need to conform to these maps in any way, shape, or form, given the complete lack of standardization.


 


Dynamically updated maps would be a major headache, especially if you started to have them keep track of the constant churn of deeds and roads. The lag induced would be horrid. Add in self created labels, and no one would use the things because it would take forever for the map to load every time you opened it as it would have to constantly update itself every single time it was called up. There's are good reasons that most MMO worlds are static; mapping is a big one.


 


Major topographical features are the most reliable way to present landmarks in this game. Most deeds, roads, and minor landmarks change far to often in this game (unlike in real life, where towns and roads are fairly static all things considered) to be effective landmarks for very long without constant updates (see above for that point).


 


In the end, the ideal maps will need to be tied to a skill, and require the use of compass and paper to create. For now, I can understand why they are basically going with a glorified map dump; it's not perfect, but it's a start, and one that doesn't disrupt the game or the development of other things overly much. It will be interesting to see if and how the maps evolve over time.


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Updates wouldn't be too hard, could be done with server maintenance (one deed missing won't be too much of a issue, just find the deed after that, even if the deed disbanded recently most of the times there's leftover houses that identify the area. I mean community maps aren't updated much more often than the server undergoes maintenance.


 


The problem with using major landmarks is that the scale of the map is too small for players to manage to orient themselves, specially if they're using smaller drawing distances, or disabled rendering distant terrain. I've sailed around the coast through my area hundreds of times, other day i did it with a alt char on a smaller client setting that has stuff like distant terrain and pretty trees disabled. Got completely lost, because i was looking for a mountain the other side of the bay and it never showed up, which means i inadvertently ended up going north instead of going southwest. Which is why having deeds automatically show up on the form, and even highways (although this would require some extra code, because either you'd have to create a new Highway tile for the map to detect and render (i'm guessing there's a coordinates system working on the map to export the position of the markers, so its a matter of creating a numeric formula to convert the coordinates on the image to wurm's coordinates) or GMs would have to add those manually. But Highways usually don't change much, and changes should be ran by GM (although sometimes it doesn't happen), so even a manual input with be representative for a while.


As for deeds, mayors could have the option on the deed form to mark their deed on the map, and could have levels of security (Global- all kingdoms, Kingdom, Alliance, Village), would be more or less like the current label system, just that the markers would be placed by the game itself.


On server maintenance, server could create a simple database check to see what deeds were removed or added from the deed database and add or remove markers accordingly.


Even real time wouldn't be that much of a strain. Just create a database trigger to update the map tokens table when the deeds table is modified. Its not like deeds are disbanded every 10s. Actually depending on how the table is setup the DBM system will do it automatically to keep data integrity/validity, without the need of any additional triggers.


Edited by ReaverKane

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Wox read and replied to a lot of the responses here. I was going to say a few things until it had already been said. Thumbs up and if anything it will do some good. Good Luck with it.


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And again, not everyone even knows how to read a topographic map, and even topographic marks have more than just topography.

So tell me how is a player supposed to "orienteer" themselves on a unfamilliar place, based on a map dump created way before people start terraforming stuff like giant spires of dirt (that's a nice landmark to check, oh wait, NOT ON THE MAP).

Truth is the only reliable landmarks are deeds (if on the map at least), and them not showing will help no one.

 

You can say whatever you want, but that's a simple truth. Main feature of wurm is how deeply you can change the landscape, so relying on years old topographic images with a low lvl of zoom, and no other labels, will be utterly USELESS to the average player without your godlike orienteering skills.

 

There will be the ability for new players to join a settlement from Spawn and once having done so, they will be provided with village annotations (including deeds, local public mines, neighboring deeds, etc) as well as alliance annotations, if applicable.

Those who don't like the map will (as stated previously and abundantly) be allowed to not use it.

Truth be told; You're hung up on the fact that you find this thing useless and you'll continue to argue with anyone who says otherwise, via tangents regarding Portuguese Caravels, or Medieval Cartography Techniques and lots of use of the word "actually".

But it's really okay.

It's not a bauble, it's a tool.. The application of which I (among others) have no trouble seeing.

It's certain you can think of better ways to spend the developers time but they have an agenda... a typically predefined workload, I'm sure... and the means to research a wide base of users and access to statistics that you or I can only speculate.

Edited by Animus

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Updates wouldn't be too hard, could be done with server maintenance (one deed missing won't be too much of a issue, just find the deed after that, even if the deed disbanded recently most of the times there's leftover houses that identify the area. I mean community maps aren't updated much more often than the server undergoes maintenance.

 

The problem with using major landmarks is that the scale of the map is too small for players to manage to orient themselves, specially if they're using smaller drawing distances, or disabled rendering distant terrain. I've sailed around the coast through my area hundreds of times, other day i did it with a alt char on a smaller client setting that has stuff like distant terrain and pretty trees disabled. Got completely lost, because i was looking for a mountain the other side of the bay and it never showed up, which means i inadvertently ended up going north instead of going southwest. Which is why having deeds automatically show up on the form, and even highways (although this would require some extra code, because either you'd have to create a new Highway tile for the map to detect and render (i'm guessing there's a coordinates system working on the map to export the position of the markers, so its a matter of creating a numeric formula to convert the coordinates on the image to wurm's coordinates) or GMs would have to add those manually. But Highways usually don't change much, and changes should be ran by GM (although sometimes it doesn't happen), so even a manual input with be representative for a while.

As for deeds, mayors could have the option on the deed form to mark their deed on the map, and could have levels of security (Global- all kingdoms, Kingdom, Alliance, Village), would be more or less like the current label system, just that the markers would be placed by the game itself.

On server maintenance, server could create a simple database check to see what deeds were removed or added from the deed database and add or remove markers accordingly.

Even real time wouldn't be that much of a strain. Just create a database trigger to update the map tokens table when the deeds table is modified. Its not like deeds are disbanded every 10s. Actually depending on how the table is setup the DBM system will do it automatically to keep data integrity/validity, without the need of any additional triggers.

I sortof agree with most of this.... Not sure how popular it would be though.

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There will be the ability for new players to join a settlement from Spawn and once having done so, they will be provided with village annotations (including deeds, local public mines, neighboring deeds, etc) as well as alliance annotations, if applicable.

Those who don't like the map will (as stated previously and abundantly) be allowed to not use it.

Truth be told; You're hung up on the fact that you find this thing useless and you'll continue to argue with anyone who says otherwise, via tangents regarding Portuguese Caravels, or Medieval Cartography Techniques and lots of use of the word "actually".

But it's really okay.

It's not a bauble, it's a tool.. The application of which I (among others) have no trouble seeing.

It's certain you can think of better ways to spend the developers time but they have an agenda... a typically predefined workload, I'm sure... and the means to research a wide base of users and access to statistics that you or I can only speculate.

You do understand that 1) not everyone joins villages when they begin, unless that's another step back that the devs want to take and force people down a certain path. So for those without a village to join, then the map will be blank, and thus useless.

2) Those markers will for the most part, and except bigger alliances be comprised of landmarks nearer the village itself, and most likely very scarce around other areas. Which means for someone traveling outside the village's "confort zones" it will be useless. And lets face it if its within the village's confort zone you don't really need the map.

So instead of adding a much better system where mayors could just add their deeds, and have the server delete disbanded deeds, we have a system that is nothing more than a in-game community map, but instead of a centralized one you have several ones according to which village and alliance you play at. Which for those complaining about server loads, do you believe that handling a couple hundred map variations is less of a load than a single one?

 

And yes i'm pissed about this. Its kind of insulting that code club devote less effort into the map for the game that puts food on their table, than those players that poured hours into scouting servers drawing maps, updating them simply to improve the game with no other personal benefit than improving the game and the community.

Edited by ReaverKane

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...

 

And yes i'm pissed about this. Its kind of insulting that code club devote less effort into the map for the game that puts food on their table, than those players that poured hours into scouting servers drawing maps, updating them simply to improve the game with no other personal benefit than improving the game and the community.

 

LOL! Who drew a map? There's map dumps, there's photoshop, I can make a updated server map in 5-10 mins if I wanted to. You just name the mountains, name the lakes, locate the canals, locate the spawn, and then poke on any deeds that wanna be there.

 

For the record, I know of VERY few people who haven't joined a deed yet... if nothing else for the alliance/village chat.

 

Also, if people have been doing that with no other intention than improving the community experience, why should they care now?.. It's making their lives easier and is in no way stopping them from going back and tile-by-tile sketching the map.

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Being able to share notations is handy, and it looks like one can share them on the kingdom, alliance?, and village level.


 


Though haven't seen anything regarding an option to share personal ones.


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Being able to share notations is handy, and it looks like one can share them on the kingdom, alliance?, and village level.

 

Though haven't seen anything regarding an option to share personal ones.

You wont be able to share them on a kingdom level, and at first only village and alliance ones are shared. 

I have thought about creating a way to let players share their private notations with each other, but it will not be included in the first update.

Just to make things clear, when an alliance notation is added it will be shared with all the members of that alliance, the same with village notations.

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Our intention are not to compete with the community maps, the in-game maps will be there to aid new players(and old) and probably they will seek out for the community maps and the Wurmpedia when they get more into the game.

 

Very glad to read this.

BTW the size feels fine, its enough to get the idea of the landmasses just fine.

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Just to make things clear, when an alliance notation is added it will be shared with all the members of that alliance, the same with village notations.

 

Will you be able to copy alliance notations to your personal notations, in case the alliance disbands? On Epic this happens very often...

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I never even thought of that, might be a good feature to add, at the moment you can work around it by creating an annotation of a different type in the same place but copying it would be easier, if you know you want to keep it with you.


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Wait, no sharing on the kingdom level is going to make it difficult to share common landmarks. The level of sharing seen with having "public" player-made maps for pvp servers, especially the Homes.


 


Same function those public maps serve in providing navigation for new kingdom or server members.


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