A common property

[Alacritous]

I noticed on ttlg a few years back there was a concerted effort to make a map of the city. figuring out where the shalebridge cradle was, how the east sector connect to the old sector, etc.

 

What I'm suggesting is a community developed full map of a (the city's) sectors so that there can be a commonality in this new "universe" that we're going to be playing in. including all the nooks and crannies and shops and whatnot. a central hub that people can hang their missions off of.

 

Of course there would be no compulsion to use it, but having a common area to play in would be nice. with street names and shops where people know where to find them. Full maps of the various sections of the city could be developed as "common property".

 

Any thoughts?

[Mr M]

I think at first it would be kinda neat, but then after a while would be like using the same "set" over and over again like in the long ago Lone Ranger show. Still could be done if it was sooo huge not all of the good hiding places could be found for a loong time....., but I like the chance to explore new towns, cities etc that I have never seen before..........

 

Good idea though

 

 

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[Stormbringer951]

It is a nice idea. I imagine that one day a group of dedicated FM makers could possibly make a full city hub, allowing us to hang missions off them and create a whole awesome campaign. That'll be the day.

[Alacritous]

This is an image I saved from that thread on TTLG, someone might recognize it.

 

I was thinking of the old T2 missions like Ambush and the Thieves highway from Uninvited guest.

 

One thing that always irked me was being unfamiliar with places that as a thief in the city my character would know like the back of his hand.

 

Content could be modified to suit the individual needs of the mapper, keep the buildings and streets the same, but the people and contents of the buildings could be modified to suit the needs of the mission, and like I said, use it as a hub to start off with, the commonality wouldn't include things like estates on the outskirts of town for example, so there'd be plenty of options to work with.

 

For example, A place like the city bank interior would be redone by the individual mission mappers, so you'd never know what you were walking into when someone hired you to rob it.

[demagogue]

If you read the Game Universe entry in the wiki, there is quite a bit of information about the city of Brigeport, which is the central city in which Dark Mod is supposed to take place. There are some districts already described. And all the released FMs should be consistent with it all. My thinking is we should wait for a lot of FMs to come out, and when we have a good base of missions we can have our own "mapping Brigeport" project to actually fill out its map. I wasn't part of the Dark Mod discussions early on, so I don't know what any plans were on the deeper details of the city. Maybe some fans could put some things together even with the information we have now; but they should do their homework to make sure it's consistent.

[Springheel]

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=The_City

 

There is a generalized map there, but nothing specific.

 

It's a hard choice between leaving things up to mappers and having missions that don't mesh well together, or spelling everything out in advance which ultimately gives mappers less freedom. We've leaned towards not being too specific; partially because it is hard to get a large team to agree on setting details and partially because there were always more important things to do towards getting the mod released.

 

Now that it is, we'll have to examine what we want to do about the setting, and how much detail mappers would like.

[Neb]

I'm for leaving it ambiguous, at least until there is plenty of material out there to sort into a geographic canon. Trying to map out a city that has hardly been explored gives mission creators an arbitrary set of restrictions.

 

 

[plasticman]

Me too. It's okay not to have some sort of canon police.

 

What will be considered canon in public consciousness depends on the impression an author can achieve with an FM. There will be classics and there will be "my first map". And somethings in between.

 

"Classics" will get a higher ratings and better reviews at the known places (like the circle or southquarter), get played by more people and so on -- looks to me like this is self-regulating.

 

I understand it is intriguing to map out the whole place. Makes it feel like home. Still it may be better to leave these vast white spaces labeled "there be dragons", so authors can put there what ever creeps up their minds. Sounds more entertaining to me when I don't know what to expect.

 

One exception though: Bridgeports bridges must be huge. I imagine in a real city you could see them from many locations in a distance. Same is true for the upper parts of the city, when looked from the lower.

 

Things like this could be put it generic skyboxes for authors to reuse according to the part of the city they are having their mission take place in. So if your mission is located in a center part west of the river, you would choose the skybox showing a hill north, one bridge north-east, the other one south-east, etc.

[Sogi-Ya]

i like the sky box idea but bear in mind the point of the dark mod was create a tool set to build ANY fantasy based mod, not just thief games. by all accounts people could build their own mod tree off the main TDM mod catering to a tactical hack and slash crowd, if someone wanted to put in the time ...

 

is cool and all to get dreamy and make the jump to "we need to turn this into a persistent setting, with a review process to ensure cannon is maintained and servers constantly hosting really slow paced sneaky death match maps!" ... or something like that ... but i think its important to bear in mind that there are two projects running at the same time here: the tool set its self and a thief based mod that the broken glass team build using the tool set.

 

having a map of the town would be cool, but it should be something that builds its self from a void as people make maps haphazardly instead of a contrived setting.

 

... as i sit here a thought pops into my head to contradict the tone of what i just posted: instead of a set map I think it would be more proficient to establish districts and then paint tile sets for each one. like the docks district has stone tile textures that have mold and barnacles growing between the cracks, or the slums use lots of rotten wood textures while the wealthy has lots of clean looking brick and stone textures.

 

so instead of having "this mission takes place in a bar thats between "X" and "Y" streets" missions could be sorted by what district it takes place in and would share the same textures as other missions from that district. just an aesthetic idea that would probably take more work than it would be functionally worth ... BUT IT WOULD BE COOL!

[Stormbringer951]

Sogi-Ya: That sounds pretty cool actually. Just build general aesthetic sets for each different location. That combined with the district maps on the wiki can provide a good resource for the mapmakers.

 

I still feel some of the "main" areas could probably be built by mappers (e.g. the bridges, city squares etc.) which mappers could use as a hub for exploring the parts of the maps left grey (the "Here be Dragons" areas that plasticman mentioned). Mapping the whole City would be counterproductive to imagination, keeping it an entirely blank slate would do, but a general hub map of the city would be a great resource to those who wish to write whole FM campaigns.

 

My 0.02USD.

[Springheel]

Things like this could be put it generic skyboxes for authors to reuse according to the part of the city they are having their mission take place in. So if your mission is located in a center part west of the river, you would choose the skybox showing a hill north, one bridge north-east, the other one south-east, etc.

 

That's a pretty neat idea, actually. We're a bit short on skyboxes at the moment.

[New Horizon]

I would prefer to keep it ambiguous as well. We don't need to know everything.

[SneaksieDave]

i like the sky box idea but bear in mind the point of the dark mod was create a tool set to build ANY fantasy based mod, not just thief games.

 

[Alacritous]

i like the sky box idea but bear in mind the point of the dark mod was create a tool set to build ANY fantasy based mod, not just thief games. by all accounts people could build their own mod tree off the main TDM mod catering to a tactical hack and slash crowd, if someone wanted to put in the time ...

 

i

 

I didn't mean that it would be a rule that you HAVE to use the common areas, but a collaborative effort to create some common ground might be useful. Of course there are going to be people that will do their own thing regardless of what anyone says, and that's good.

 

Think of it more as an anthology kind of setup, like the thieves world books. There are people out there that are more creative than others, they might be better at stories than they are at mapping, so if they have an area already mapped out that they can hang their stories on, then we get more missions faster if they don't have to worry about spending a week getting the cornice on that building just right.

 

The reverse is also true, there might be people that are really good at mapping, but aren't good at stories. Team work and collaboration could bring us some fantastic stuff if we can make it easier for them to do their thing.

Edited October 21, 2009 by Alacritous