Professional Mapping. in Design Philosophy

ID:153378
 
Apr 12 2004, 8:54 pm
HHmm, not even sure if 'mapping' is a real word but it seems to work. Well I have never been a good mapper, I could never place the turfs together to give a very nice turn-out. My maps are usually (the player starts at 1,1,1 and follows squared paths around the whole map going into squared buildings with poorly place items.

Can I get some tips on how to make a map look professional please?
#1 Apr 13 2004, 3:57 am
Most of it is in the icons. They have to match in style. I can't stress how important it is for your turfs to be the same style as your mobs. They also have to be good. You can make a great map but it's nothing if it looks like vomit. This doesn't mean you need the greatest icons, just that you need icons that are made to a standard.
The next big thing is variation. A 50x50x10 map made up of grass, water, dirt, house, path and sand isn't going to look good no matter how well you've laid it out. Once you have five differnt types of grass, twenty tree types, etc you're map becomes interesting by defualt.
After that you've got to figure out the layout. Start by figuring out your key features (towns, caves and general big things), then your lesser features (rivers, mountians and stuff that players can identify the area with, but don't go their because of the feature). After that you've just got to fill it with junk.
When it comes to filler content you've got to always use the right pretty-to-functional ratio for the traffic amount and traffic type the area will receive.

One very important thing is getting the scale of the entire map right. You've got to make it so that it's functional (you don't have people going afk and blocking off access to an entire town), make it look right with the icons and make it consistant.
It's alright to have the world map tiny compared to the location maps, just as long as they follow a consistant format throughout the entire game.
#2 Apr 13 2004, 5:41 pm
In response to DarkView (#1)
I don't consider myself to be an excellent mapper, but I do know what I don't like; and in this case, what I don't like is people getting out the rectangular placement tool, select the water turf, draw a rectangle in the middle of nowhere and say "cool, now I have a pond". It has to have rough edges. If it's rectangular it looks incredibly artificial, which looks very bad. The same goes for forests, and anything else that's not man-made. Constructed things, like buildings, can be rectangular (obviously) but should still look interesting.

Interest and realism are the keys here. If you can make it interesting to look at, and it looks real enough to pass muster, then you should do okay. Of course it has to be functional as well, as DarkView said, and there's more to mapping than just making stuff look pretty.
#3 Apr 13 2004, 7:33 pm
I do have different types of grass, water, ect, but I was thinking I could make the map look better by different color shades, light grass, medium, and dark, and of course everything in between, but I never got how you get those 100+ turns and angles on turfs, I simply cut diagonally across them and have 4 corner edges on most turfs. :\
#4 Apr 13 2004, 8:42 pm
In response to Barathos (#3)
Barathos wrote:
I do have different types of grass, water, ect, but I was thinking I could make the map look better by different color shades, light grass, medium, and dark, and of course everything in between, but I never got how you get those 100+ turns and angles on turfs, I simply cut diagonally across them and have 4 corner edges on most turfs. :\

http://www.byondscape.com/ascape.dmb/LummoxJR.2002-1231/ is a good read.