Doing Things the Hard Way - full map

[Bloodshadow]

[Applekid]

Ha ha, I was working on putting together a full map of the whole game. I turned off backgrounds so I can photoshop Cap'n Viridian out. Haven't gotten to those rooms yet.

(That disappearing platform should have been planted deeper so you have to avoid those four 2nd-level spikes.  )

[The Brass]

Ha ha, I was working on putting together a full map of the whole game. I turned off backgrounds so I can photoshop Cap'n Viridian out. Haven't gotten to those rooms yet.

(That disappearing platform should have been planted deeper so you have to avoid those four 2nd-level spikes.  )

I attempted that too. Removing Viridiand with mspaint is easy even with the backgrounds on. However, I quickly ran out of processing power. The map will certainly hit 100 million pixels, which means four gigabytes of data at rgb256. That's scary.

[Applekid]

I attempted that too. Removing Viridiand with mspaint is easy even with the backgrounds on. However, I quickly ran out of processing power. The map will certainly hit 100 million pixels, which means four gigabytes of data at rgb256. That's scary.

I was thinking more about The Laboratory where all those flying rectangles in the background would look odd on the borders of maps when splicing together. I don't think the exact color Viridian is ever used on any map so it can just get replaced to black, but, I was planning to tackle The Tower first.

I had an old Pascal program from The Bad Old Days where I attempted a graphics editor that was optimized for large graphics (large for the day being over 960 pixels tall & wide (320x320 times 9 (scroll buffer) in 8-bit RGB), where, outside the buffer, the swapped out stuff was paged out in small, compartmentalized RLE encoded temp files. If I run into problems, I might just dust off that source and try it again. (Mwa ha ha)

[nathanel]

I was thinking about doing it (map of the whole V dimension), but the awesome task of capturing and saving every screen was just way too daunting. Actually, I was rather thinking about making a thumbnail-map, with hyperlinks leading to full-size view, or at least a miniature map with room names in mouse-on hovering-balloon-thingies. It would be an incredible help as it is useful to use roomnames in forums like here, but not everyone (yet! ) remembers name of every single room in the game.

BTW you do not need to use full RGB palette, every room uses a very small number of colours (like, 8? 16?). So you need 8*number_of_distinct_room_colouring_schemes, that is probably much smaller than number of rooms. Furthermore, it would seem reasonable to convert everything to just shades of grey. This would significantly reduce size of memory needs.

[Bloodshadow]

Doing a map on the entire game? That is simply not possible, at least in full size. You could try to shrink the maps, as much as you can, before they get hard to see. But still, that will be insanely time-consuming and not worth the effort. I just did a map on Doing Things the Hard Way because I was bored.

To tell the truth, I have yet to attempt this challenge.

[Applekid]

Doing a map on the entire game? That is simply not possible, at least in full size. You could try to shrink the maps, as much as you can, before they get hard to see. But still, that will be insanely time-consuming and not worth the effort. I just did a map on Doing Things the Hard Way because I was bored.

To tell the truth, I have yet to attempt this challenge.

Of course it's possible.

Maybe a full map isn't really worth the effort for gameplay purposes, but I sure could use a new poster on my wall.

So far I've got the "full" space station, if you ignore the unlabelled rooms around it. This WIP also has a "room name" layer turned off, it's just a placeholder for now. I haven't done a web project in a long while so maybe it'd be a good little interactive map with name lookup? Dunno.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[StephenM3]

Wow, Ak, that's pretty awesome!  I like how since the game itself is blocky, it can scale down with no loss of detail.  I can see where you might have some trouble in the fact that the overworld screens are one V taller than the level screens...  But looking at even this little chunk was quite interesting and revelatory!

[nathanel]

Wow this is epic!!! You are my master from today!

Looking at these pic gives me a better idea of how complicated the level design is

[Applekid]

I can see where you might have some trouble in the fact that the overworld screens are one V taller than the level screens...

I thought so too, but, not really! I suspected that the line of map blocked by the room name is inconsequential to remove, joining the two screens and so far so good. There is some tearing between rooms (like all those around Doing Things the Hard Way) but since you can't hide the room names anyway you can't see what was there anyway.

So the snags from Dimension V use the same crop as level rooms. The Elephant, however, was pretty tricky, since even with lining it up with no gaps it had some gnarly tears. Nothing a little pixel planting can't fix.

Can't attach anymore since it's too big, so....

Moved Here since now we're really talking full-map

Didn't link since I think I'm having an issue with my .htaccess file... So, just copy/paste.

[nathanel]

Wow! Great work!

Also there is a thread here titled 'Full world maps' that seems to go unnoticed, someone put there entire VVVVVV map in a bunch of pieces (unfortunatelly from beta, but still very cool thing)