[Advanced] Mapping for RPG and not for showoff. By MmB.

Hi,
I had to copy this tutorial because this is the best tutorial at OTfans IMO. This tutorial changed my mapping style, it really helped me. I think it will help some mappers around here too.


:::: ALL CREDTIS TO MmB [Mannen med brillorna] ::::


"It's not all about details."
Silent Reaper.
Words. If one is interested in making a functional and playable map, that is. I am going to take the subject further for those who wants to know more about the difference between making maps for playing and maps for exhibition. I will with the aid of my earlier experiences show you the essential basis on which a playable RPG is built upon. But before this, I must make clear for people the difference between a map made for exhibition and one made for playing. All too often do I see people reject mappers work at the showoff room due to its "obvious lack of detail". I suggest flamers to bear in mind that some showoffs are for servers where too much details sometimes might have more or less devastating consequences. I made it sound a bit too melodramatic, but it's basically true.
Anyway, this is not really relevant. Before we throw ourselves headfirst into piles of facts, I'm going to give a few examples of various places in which the amount of details has an essential importance for the purpose of the game.
Although, to begin with, a little reminder - with this tutorial I do not wish to be seen as some sort of besserwisser and I am certainly not in belief that this is rules meant to be followed, when in reality it is only the way I see things when I map. Hopefully, it can help you as much as it has helped me.
Now, let's take a look at a randomly chosen tunnle leading from point A to point B.



My first impression is that it's entirely jammed with stones. Some would in a commending way say it has enough details. Some would say it has too much of wrong details. But let's view the picture from a different angle. What did I have in mind when I created it? What will peoples reaction be and what problems will they be introduced to in different situations when they find themselves in this place? The common player will probably be slightly annoyed by the numerous obstacles. These obstacles might also provide the perfect assistance for the player killer to trap player X. Is this our intention? If yes, then the tunnle lives up to its purpose. But if not, then we might have to consider a reorganisation.



After the reorganisation the tunnle looks like this. The sharp eye will directly notice the addition of various details and the removal of the majority of the stones. However, the new details has no blocking property and will not aid the player killer in trapping player X anymore. We have circumvented this problem.
But there are more. Many more. I will try to discuss as many as I possibly can later, but here I will only ask you one question. Knowing that this tunnle needs preferably much time to do, assuming it's quite much longer than we see on the picture, we might ask ourselves - have we got enough time? Will the players even notice all these details? The answer to the first question is of course depending, and to be honest the second one is too. But if we want to have a functional and playable map, the result below is more than enough.



Glimpsing at the picture we notice quickly that many details has been removed. In the eyes of many, it now lacks detail and is of no real interest. But is this the way the majority of the players thinks? No, it is not. Now please bear in mind that I am not saying your tunnles and cavities should follow the same pattern. It's important that you remember that each and every cave needs an unique touch to be interesting, but you don't have to exaggerate this. I will return to the subject of unique touch later, where I will give a few examples of variations that will catch the players attention.
Now, the finicky ones will want to complain about a few lumps of the the same IDs placed close to each other. The picture below shows what I mean.



Inside the red circles I have repeatedly put the same earth variation next to each other. Why? Why not? To be honest, when you're running through a cave you're not very concentrated on the details, and especially not on the earth outside the cave walls, and even if you were it would take quite extreme attention to notice this. And in my honest opinion, it doesn't look very bad.
Secondly, inside the blue circles I have put the same ground tiles next to each other. Now, the ground is often something people have their eyes on, so why do like I have done, you might ask yourself? Well, now think about this: hasn't randomization become some sort of silly dogma? The tiles actually randomize themselves. People has again and again tried to go better than one and another by adding more and more details to their mapping and eventually developed this curious form of dogma.
Let's summarize what we have read so far. We have seen three pictures of one tunnle in which the fundamental details matters for the gameplay. If we would have kept the first layout players would become an easy prey for player killing or trapping, and perhaps this was our intentions. The second picture is perhaps suitable for a slightly shorter cave or one which players visit on a quite constant basis, while the third one is suitable for longer tunnles where players won't be too aware of the details when running through. What I'm trying to say is that we must remember to have in mind how our mapping will influence the gameplay.
Well then, I've introduced you to some of my opinions, and if you find them interesting you are welcome to continue in the next chapter below.

Unique Touch
In spite of all this, the unique part of mapping must not be disregarded, as I briefly mentioned earlier. I will now go deeper into the subject with the intention to show my personal opinion of why unique details are so important, but yet not to be exaggerated. I will also show a few pictures in where I have added what I see as unique touch. Important to stress, I believe, is that these unique touch details must not be exaggerated. If a player walks through a tunnle where everything is exactly the same all the way through, he won't enjoy the details at all... and then the time spent on detailing this area would have been wasted. Below we have a concrete example of this:



In my opinion an extremely basic cavity. Absolutely nothing special and nothing you would like to showoff really, but that's not what the cave is for either, is it? It fulfils its purpose. But really, we want a unique touch of detail. Therefor, I have added these details on the picture below - not too many, not too few.



As you can see I've added an extremely narrow crack in the cave wall, some branches hanging down on the cave walls and lastly two spots covered by grass, where the cave wall changes from stone to mud. I believe this gives the cavity certain unique touch while retaining its somewhat clean outlay. We haven't exaggerated details and we have neither ignored them completely - a sufficient mixture. Thus the best result, unless our intentions with the area is different. Let us assume, for example, that we instead want this place to be a somewhat narrow cave jammed with stalagmites and stones, creating a danger zone where the risk for player killing is enhanced. Then must we think about this before we start our mapping or we will have to reorganize.
Yet again do I like to emphasize the importance of a second thought before mapping - what are your intentions with this specific area? What details are worthless and what aren't and how will the mapped area and its details affect the players gameplay?

Spawns
The amounts of creatures and monsters placed in the map is needless to say quite important. This is another dogma which has come to life here on OTFans - the amount of creatures spawned in the same room or cavity. According to this dogma no map which should be used for gaming purposes should have spawns in which "too" many creatures are... for else the map is "better used for a 100x server".
Needless to mention, this can't be true. Take a look at the following two pictures and compare their spawns.





I am not saying everyone reacts this way, but I have seen it many times before on OTFans; many people would prefer picture number one before number two for a low experience RPG server. Why?
"No low level who hunt trolls can handle seven of them at the same time. Two is way better for RPG!"
Wrong.
Let us try to see the whole picture here. What is upstairs? Probably an entire troll tribe in different rooms? Or something like that? Yes, probably - so let's assume this room we see on the picture is just one out of many. Therefor, as mappers we can put easier spawns in the other rooms and in this specific room, or even in more, we can put a hard spawn. It will be a challenge for the low level player, thus we enhance the RPG feeling instead of reducing it as the dogma would have said.
As a player in this situation I would have walked down to the counter in the downer left corner and trapped myself behind the table and with that I would only have to face two trolls at once. So again, this is something to bear in mind when placing spawns. Bigger or harder spawns here and there might be a great idea, both because it brings a different challenge and because it forces the player to use different or new techniques in order to kill all the monsters.
But just because I decided to show in this thread an example of positive 'over-spawning' I am not saying you should put hard and big spawns all over your map. No, this is something which should be quite rare, unless the certain area in which the spawns are says different.
Below I show another example in which both scenarios are perfectly suitable for a RPG server.





As you can see the second picture might look a bit frightening at first sight. Two serpent spawns and two hydras can quickly take down even the strongest of blockers. And that is perfectly true, but how often does players run headfirst into a room when they know the place in general is inhabitated by dangerous monsters? There are far more crowded places in Tibia, but the players in Tibia have learned that you must lure the creatures preferably one by one if you're going to survive. A very fine example for this is the pits of inferno.
Here is a picture which I took the liberty to borrow, I hope Mikeke has sympathy. It's from his pits of inferno. He showed it in the showoff room quite a while ago, and the replies were as following:
"I think it is overspawned."
"Yeah, it's really overcrowded, nobody would survive this."
"Overspawned..."
"Ehm... is this for a 1000000x exp serv? If not, it's overspawned."
"If you make this map for servers x1 to x4 ITS OVERSPAWNED!"
Well, I could go on... but you get the idea. Now, the picture:


(Copyright Mikeke.)

Okey, the proportions of the room might not be one hundred percent correct, but still... let's count the creatures, shall we?

Quote :

3 Dark Torturers
7 Lost Souls
2 Demons
1 Banshee

I have personally counted the monsters in these two rooms in Tibias version of the pits of inferno... and remember, Tibis is 1x experience.

Quote :

9 Dark Torturers
9 Lost Souls
1 Demon
3 Banshees

Do you get my point?

Squares
Another heated subject here on OTFans is the square buildings and caves. I'm sceptical on using the word dogma again as it is getting slightly pestered, but most of us know the usual reaction to a square building in the showoff room. However, again, I believe it's totally wrong. Buildings are very often square, although it might sound boring. I have three examples of houses below. Two of them I consider square, one I consider the opposite. Two of them I consider good, one I consider bad.







Honestly, you must have figured out which one of these three I dislike by now... frankly, the third house looks pathetic. And not only that, it isn't very comfortable to be in either. So from now on, remember that you can make your houses square - it's the better alternative.
Furthermore, this square issue covers also cavities of all its kinds. Unfortunately, due to the limit of 15 pictures per thread, I will have to continue in the next post.

yours,
SuRv1vOr

Hi,
Here is the second part of his/her tutorial!


:::: ALL CREDITS TO MmB [ Mannen med Brillorna ] ::::


Squares
(Continued)
Square caves? Have you stumbled across the subject before? Take a look at the upper cave wall at the first picture below; is it really that ugly? As a player, would you really think about it much? I wouldn't really think so. And the second picture; a quite square room, but isn't it quite okey after all? Compare it with the third picture. Personally, I think it looks completely screwed up. Logically, I mean, because the caves has probably been dug.







Believe it or not, but square caves or houses are sometimes actually much better than skew ones, as you can see in my examples above. But remember, not always. Certainly not.

Nature
You can map nature in many, many way. Some are bad, some are good. But I believe I should bring up the subject briefly, and show what I believe to be the most suitable nature for a RPG server and also how to vary it properly.
Before I show a few picture examples, I would like to tell you the various alternatives I personally see myself in possess of while mapping nature.
I vary my nature from dense forest to its straight contrast, with rock soil and meadows. Some would say a big meadow like the one on the picture below is undetailed, but instead if provides a very nice variation from the usual forest type nature.


Also, below is three examples of what I mean with dense forest and its opposite, and lastly rock soil.







Now if you give yourself a little time to plan and add a sufficient mixture of dense forest and normal forest, with rock soil and meadows at suitable places you will notice that your nature gets better and more interesting, while retaining the perfect environment for players.

Efficiency
This chapter might be debatable, I know that. And you will notice that, too. But after a few hours of mapping you will probably begin to agree with me. Actually, it sounds a bit silly and it might only be a matter of minuters or even seconds, but as I mentioned - after a few hours of mapping it gets tiring, and this is when efficiency gets handy.
First of all, I must just mention this; when mapping gets tiring, then is the right moment to either take a break or quit for the day, for your imagination starts to lag behind and your brain automatically skips certain steps just to finish quicker. Bear that in mind for the wealth of your map.
However, efficiency isn't really a subject which is easy to teach, so I won't even try. Instead, I will explain how I use efficiency to my benefit and give a few examples, and hopefully, out of that, you may also learn how to use it.
So basically, it's about being as effective as we possibly can, thus we are able to finish the area quicker, without skipping any steps or being negligent. I try to always be one step ahead of myself. This might sounds weird, but let me try to explain what I mean. For example, let's assume we are making the cave walls for a small room.



Instead of putting the cave walls one piece by piece as shown below...



... we put one piece at all possible places before continuing with the next piece, as below.



With that we speed up the cave wall making significantly. Now, I know that the autobordering function does this automatically and much quicker, but this technique does not only cover borders of all its kinds, but also house creating and similar places where you may apply more than one piece of the same ID.
Furthermore, knowing what you are going to map saves you alot of time. By planning your future mapping, either in a paint document or in your mind, you will know what to put where. But all this is so personal, and I'm afraid the subject is all too wide to cover effectively. Also, I believe efficiency is something you must develop by yourself, but when you handle it you will notice it becomes a very nice tool when you are mapping.

The RPG
I don't know whether this tutorial has helped you or not, but hopefully you have had a small insight in what I believe intensifies the gameplay for your server and players. Before I finish this thread I would like to summarize the most important parts set out above.
Firstly, we must remember that the amount of details we apply to a certain area affect the gameplay in many ways. Before we start to map we must always remember to have in mind what this certain area is to be used for. We must also consider how much we believe the specific area is going to be visited on a daily basis, and with that apply the right, or necessary, amount of details. After this we cannot forgot about the unique touch we should have in our caves, to make them all different.
Furthermore, the spawns is another issue we should consider carefully. We don't really have to put small spawns everywhere to keep retain the RPG feeling... instead, scattered harder spawns instantly heightens it.
Next, the dogma about square buildings or cavities must be ignored and you should use squares to your benefit instead of the contrary.
Lastly, you should consider developing your own style of efficiency as it probably will help you much in your future mapping.
What you always must remember is the big difference between showoff and RPG.

Sincerely yours,
MmB
&
yours,
Surv1vOr..

Its copied Tru
But I Agree with you that its a very Well Done tutorial by Mannem
He Deserves a 10/10

This is a very good tutorial
People learn from this

MmB is the best mapper ever =)

Great tips

Nice that you released it here

i like MmB Very Happy swedish guy :p and very good mapper Wink


ps: Yet again the fourth double post since you registered.
I deleted all double posts, so they wont be useful for rising your post count.
I'm being nice to not delete most of your normal posts, since all of them are empty and are considered spam. If you want posts, make them worth it.

Well, i gues he is the best mapper? Anyway, i didn't know he was swedish. :O He is such a great mapper, and he also shares his skills with others by making tutorials. Perfect! dont make double posts..

yours,
SuRv1vOr..