Website & Forums Option to hide unvisited parts of the map

Heyy,
I'm returning to the game and enjoying it a lot so far. One Problem which I encountered is tho, that the world map is a huge spoiler for new players (and returning ones), but it is also very practical. So I wanna use it, but in the same time don't wanna look at it at all.

So, I think it would be a great mechanic, to have to discover the world map, for people who wanna go all in in the role play. This could be done on a province level, so each time a player visits a province or city for the first time, it gets unlocked in the map.

This mechanic would make discovering the world much more fun I think.

For people who don't like this, there could simply be an option to "clear the clouds" off the map.

Thanks in advance!

 

You could use an in-game minimap for this; it's not the same experience but it will at least offer that level of mystery for new areas. I think this makes a lot of sense to add though, because the players who will be needing the map the most are newer players and, as you pointed out, having the whole map shown to you in high detail is rather spoilery.

 

Are you talking about the website map?

 

Yes

 

Wait so how would it look like if someone who doesn't play the game enters the website

 

I guess, the standard would be, that people can't see the map. There can be a info that says: In order to discover the map, play on the server (Or use the option to uncover it).

I mean yeah, that would be a bit weird, having a completely covered map on the website, but I think it is also weird to have such a huge spoiler for the game on the website :P And for me, back in the days when I played the first time, some parts of the map where still covered, because they where not out yet, and I actually thought that was exciting instead of weird. Shows that there is stuff to discover.

To make it a bit more exciting, I just thought about, not just having a uniform cloud cover above it, but have for example black clouds above the Silent Expanse and maybe have some big Landmarks like the Tower of Ascension or Mount Wynn reach out a bit of the clouds, to make players more curious. I mean even if the map is covered, it doesn't have to be boring.

 

I think that having it covered with the option to uncover it would probably work fine. I'd make sure to add some sort of waypoint system though; if you're trying to figure out how to get somewhere, and for whatever reason the in-game directions don't give you enough info, but it's also not somewhere you've been, it would be good if you didn't have to fully reveal the map to see where something is. Maybe something in the vein of a low-detail, paper-esque map that gets full detail as you explore, that would let you know where specific landmarks are but wouldn't show anything beyond basic details.

They actually already have a system that would work for tracking where the player has been; territorial discoveries, which could be used to track what territories you have or haven't visited (possibly with the option to click to unlock a specific territory, in case of them being reset again). They could probably even tailor it to a specific class. I'm kinda curious how difficult this would be to set up: at first I was thinking this would be a ton of work, but since they track territory discoveries in a similar manner as quests, I see no reason they wouldn't be able to easily check where the player has been and feed that info into the map. If someone in the dev team reads this I'd love to hear how reasonable that would be.

 

I feel like it would make more sense to have it uncovered then if the player wants, cover it but thats just by 2 cents

 

mojang, give us the technology to do an in game map.

 

That would be really cool! But I think it doesn't change, that doing it with the website map would also be good.

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I think covered should be the standard and uncover it if the person wants that, because for the person who wants to have it uncovered, it doesn't matter if they see a covered map for a second, but for the person who doesn't wants to get spoiled it does matter if they see the uncovered map for a second.

 

Given what else you guys have been able to do, I'm honestly kinda surprised this isn't possible.

 

This method is going to be really shoddy because of the abysmal 128x128 pixel resolution but I can't think of a better vanilla option

I wonder how much updating a held offhand map item's display image for every player every tick tanks the server's performance

 

Actually, is there any reason that an ingame map using something similar to the ability tree wouldn't work? It wouldn't be able to achieve the perfect, screenshot level of detail of the website map, but I bet something cute and thematically appropriate could be made.

 

Can we please replace the guild territory map with this?

I mean, it works. You give the player maps for each province that display stylised pixel-art renditions of the whole province's territory, giving a rough impression of where different areas of the map are with few details. You see the map for the province you're currently in, or there's a quest unlock condition for a province's map (since you can't have a "pick which province you want to see" map due to needing to keep Fruma and the Silent Expanse secret from the new player). You can hover over a region in the map to see a quest lock on it; once you've completed that quest (ex: Grave Digger for Nemract, The Mercenary for Almuj, A Journey Further for the Toxic Wastes, Void Valley, and Road to Dern), you can click that region to see a zoomed-in look that features more detail, perhaps including waypoints for ex. caves that you can then click to set a Content Book marker for it, the same as if you'd clicked on the corresponding entry.

 

https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/working-in-game-map-with-video-showcase-93-4-46-votes.287504/
You can do a lot more then what's in this suggestion, it was made a long time ago.
Especially because you can use the entire inventory now, so it can have a lot more detail.
That being said, a in-game map is perfectly viable, the issue isn't weather or not it can be done, but in the details, like how often it would need to be updated, and other such things.

 

Saw that suggestion a long time ago as well, although a fixed grid means that navigating's a lot more choppy that I would like. Not to mention waypoints and the player character being forced to stick to the center of the grid spaces.

GUI-based dynamic diagrams are also really flawed in the sense that you need a separate texture for every single possible square section of the map, along with every variation of each section that contains some map feature assuming that system allows that, not exactly that space-efficient. The poster even admitted that it tripled the size of the 2021 resource pack from that alone.

 

The point of my post was to bring up the fact that it can be done, but there are some issues with it. That being said, everything you posted is more about design and exact implementation issues than issues with the concept itself.

A pretty simple solution to this is to do a region-based map instead.
Think the World of Warcraft map, where instead of the map being centered on the player, you break the map into different regions, and display a fixed pov for that region.
You will likely need a world map as well, to allow players to select the region they want to see. This also happens to solve some of the marker issues, as things like caves and quests will always be in a fixed location on the map, so they can just be built into the texture for the region map itself.

As for player location and way-points, if you break down each inventory space into 9 different points and make a single player marker texture for each, you can pretty accurately display the players location just using 9 textures. It's accurate enough that players would be pretty unlikely to notice. As for way-points, you do the same-thing, but make a second set of textures that's offset one space down in-case the player is in the same location as the way-point. (I'm sorry if none of this made sense, I can work on a visual example if that would help, I may have worded it poorly.)

Meaning you can pretty accurately display both way-points and player location using a total of 27 fairly small textures.
In fact the entire map would be made up of 1 texture for the world map, 1 texture for each region, and the 27 marker textures.
It would be very comparable in texture pack size to some of the current GUI elements.

 

This is what I suggested.