Map Making

Dec 05, 2021

I Wonder If I Can Make a Map?

Well, so far there are a decent number of people interested in feelies.

However, spending money on commisioning a map for the project might not be in the works. Map making can be a time consuming affair, and in the end could cost a goodly chunk of money. Considering the level of interest I have seen in the project thus far, commisioning a map would likely take up an overly large cut of the overall cost. Enough that it could impact production/expenditure on other important things, like the book or box.

So I am trying my hand at making the map myself. If I do it it will cost the project nothing, and allow me to push funds into other places. Perhaps I can’t make the map as well as the artist I have/had lined up, but I may be able to do it well enough to do the project justice. So that is where I am at right now. Here is a little photo gallery showing my work in progress.

While I carry on with this I have added a ‘Landing’ page for the website, which introduces the Feelies and let’s people sign up if they are interested. I am not really doing any promotion at all, so if you do know someone who might be into getting feelies, and the mod itself, send ‘em this way!

There is still some time before I commit to somekind of crowd-funding effort, but it is looking likely.

I have made considerable progress on producing the ‘digital’ resources for the feelies. I may have to make some kind of checklist and start marking them off as I complete them. Obviously the map is not done, but several other components are good to go, or very nearly.

How about Beta testing!? Well, the beta testers are going through their second play throughs. Limited bug fixing, as there are not too many left, but one combat bug has reared its head and taken up some of our focus/effort. Other than that it is mostly balancing stuff now.

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5 Comments

Magicman

December 07, 2021 at 06:32 PM

I always loved the fabric maps. Excited to see more of what you’re making!

Magicman

December 08, 2021 at 01:51 AM

Care to share what the combat bug was? As a developer I love that stuff :)

Cambragol

December 08, 2021 at 04:56 AM

Sure!

We discovered a very rare case where a ‘hit’ mark, denoting a miss by an NPC, would appear in a random location on the combat map.

It was very rare though, only showing up a handful of times for me, and beta-testers alike. So, very tricky to narrow down and test. I tried to first tweak things to increase the chance of it happening, but nothing seemed to achieve that. Then I went though the code, tracking any and all code that could place a dot on the screen. I found a huuuuge error in one of my functions, which had only two variables being called, rather than the three the function was expecting. I strongly suspect that was the culprit, and we are now testing to see if I was correct. So far I have tested about 60-70 battles and have not seen the bug again. Just waiting for the Beta-testers to report in.

The function in question is part of a slight tweak to how combat/hits are calculated. Now the ‘level’ of the attacker is factored in, so lower level creatures have less of a chance to hit the player, and higher level creatures a greater chance. In OG Ultima IV, the creature attacking has no impact on the ‘hit’ calculation. A small tweak, but brings a little more realism, and makes combat with tougher creatures…tougher.