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[insaneinside]

We're dealing with vectors, no?  So let's use vector equations.

The horrible formula I have for deriving x2,y2 from x1,y1 is nothing less than:
x2, y2, = x1,y1 + (x1,y1 - midPoint).normalized * (1-d1)*(d1 ^ (4 + 2*d1))*2;

Since you drew the second point closer to the midpoint than the first, I'll assume you meant "midPoint - x1,y1" there.

Substituting and , and further considering the midpoint as the origin, this reduces to the vector equations



which gives us the following scalar equation for the vectors' magnitudes (d1=a, d2=b) after removing the "vector arrows" and multiplying through:

Hm, it outputs imaginary numbers... That might be why I can't reverse the equation, the answers end up on the imaginary axis...

Indeed, you would have trouble producing an analytical solution for a in terms of b here!  There may be a way to determine it numerically, but I doubt it would be possible (let alone a good idea!) to do so in a shader.

[gimymblert]

I did the trick where I remove the mid point too, but by that time It was more clever to use a tween function as it does the same thing with less hassle

[castled]

Could you simply draw the markers onto the map texture and then use the shader? Does this solution violate the "pixel precision" requirement? The markers will be in the right spots, but they will be distorted like the map is. Since the map distortion is fairly subtle, I don't think it would look bad, but it probably depends on the style of the markers.

[JLJac]

@insaneinside, welcome and thank you so much! That looks really interesting, I will look into it. Also, thanks for letting me know the proper maths notation.

Indeed, you would have trouble producing an analytical solution for a in terms of b here!  There may be a way to determine it numerically, but I doubt it would be possible (let alone a good idea!) to do so in a shader.

This wouldn't be in the shader though, but in the C# code - I'm trying to do the shader maths backwards in order to place a marker on the map within the game logic. As for the issue being solvable, it should theoretically be possible seeing how every a only has one b, if you get me   Anyways, thanks a million, I'll take a closer look at your math

Update 497

Fog of war and "slow reveal" animation for the map.

The fog of war is pretty straight forward. As you move through the world it draws to a texture, which is then used to determine what of the map to reveal.



The "slow reveal" animation looks like this (on a fully explored map, it looks slightly different if you just have bits and pieces uncovered):



It's essentially a flood-fill out from the player's position. We implemented this for a few reasons.

One is that we want it to feel like you're accessing the slugcat's spatial memory rather than just bringing up a map on some HUD - the slugcat is an animal, not a cyborg super soldier. If it takes a bit of time, its communicated to the player that this is an act of thinking long and hard about what was where, not just "bringing up the map".

Another is that that the animation doubles as a time penalty. The idea is that the filling in animation should be somewhat satisfying and fun to watch, masking the penalty aspect from the player while the actual gameplay implications of it remain; namely that you spend precious seconds just standing still. Hopefully this will incentivize fewer and longer map sessions rather than quickly tabbing in and out of it once every room. We want the player to look at the game, not the HUD - if you flicker in and out of the map you don't pay as much attention to landmarks in the environment, and looking at the environment is exactly what we want you to do as much as possible. Also we want the player to have to keep at least some of their route in their head, as that's part of the game's challenge.

A third one would be that your inability to move in combination with the enemy still being mobile will require you to find a good hiding spot for bringing the map up, which feels like a nice atmospheric element.

The flood fill has a bit of a bias towards where you're panning the map, so you can sort of "pull" it a bit in one direction or another. If you release the map button quickly, your map reveal progress is saved, but if you wait for too long or move around too much it's reset. There is some forgiveness though, if you take the map down and quickly move a few steps in some direction you can bring it up again without it being reset.

The blue color in the map signifies an edge of the explored area which is not a wall - basically somewhere you might potentially explore further. Not 100% settled on the aesthetic of that element just yet, but I think the functionality is sound, it makes a lot of sense that you should be able to easily browse for potential exploration destinations.

The dotted lines are, as I'm sure you've understood, longer connections between rooms.



These have been a bit of a problem in some of the earlier regions, that were developed when we thought of the rooms more as free entities rather than part of a whole that should make geographical sense. HI (pictured) is sort of on the edge of that paradigm shift. In the gif you can see that I first pan over a bunch of rooms that make a lot of geographical sense, but then I pan to the right and things get pretty jumbled with lots of dotted lines crossing over each other and the rooms they're connected to. That latter chaotic look is part of what we're going to try to tone down in the upcoming level work. A big majority of it seems to be solvable just by re-connecting the rooms, and where that doesn't work we'll add the occasional simple little connector room. Not all of the dotted lines will necessarily be eliminated though - personally I kind of like having a few of them spicing up the look of the map. The criss-crossy chaos in the rightmost part of this map however will be worked with a bit.

[gimymblert]

It's a bit hard to read I found there is to much information.

Just a reflection, What if you only show relational connectivity like in urban transport map, animal and human (at least me) seems to build more that kind of map (this lead to that) rather than complete map with all the twist and turn.

The problem come from differentiating the node visually so we recognized where they lead to ... maybe as we scroll the map and highlight node, sparse representation of their landmark could appear?

[JLJac]

Valid concern!

I think that the reason why it looks very busy and overwhelming is that you're unfamiliar with it. In the context of the game, you will yourself "draw" the map by moving through the region over and over again, so at any given time you should not be presented with more information than you can handle.

For comparison, when you first enter a region the map won't look any more impressive/confusing than this:



Which should definitely be within what anyone can deal with. From there you build the insane crazy big map yourself by moving around, meaning that you have an actual relationship to all the places shown in the map as you're guaranteed to have seen them in the actual game before.

Reducing the map to an abstract node graph crossed my mind, but it has a pretty big downside - if the rooms are not at least to some degree depicted, how do you know which room is which?

[Christian]

The map looks really confusing. I still don't understand how to interpret the layered maps and the lines seems like it make the maps even more cluttered

Maybe just have the thought map display the immediate area where you are, and the longer you think, the more the map zooms out to display more. Having this big scrolling overlay just seems like too much. I don't think all that information is needed all the time. It just looks really overwhelming

At least for me, playing the alpha, the most important information I think I need in a map is

1) my current location
2) the location of the shelter I started in
3) the locations of any shelters I found
4) the routes I took from those shelters
5) region gates

That's the most frustrating part of the game so far IMO. Trying to figure which rooms and vents take me back to a shelter when the meteorological clock is ticking. That's the only moment I feel I'd only really a map. The other times I explored the maps, I would stick to a known route and then branch off, and eventually I learned the main thoroughfares and shortcuts. It's in those panicking rushes for safety that I'd be annoyed that I'm lost and not sure what the best route was.

[JobLeonard]

Reducing the map to an abstract node graph crossed my mind, but it has a pretty big downside - if the rooms are not at least to some degree depicted, how do you know which room is which?

As long as the more significant rooms have something that makes them recognisable, I don't think that argument will quite hold. You will probably remember there were "three long horizonal rooms connecting significant landmark to next significant landmark". Metroid maps were  always pretty abstract too, yet it was still easy to follow.

Also, now you have a kind of opposite problem that the map gives a "birds-eye" view (well, side-view equivalent) to rooms that you never see zoomed out in-game. Which is exactly why our minds make maps in the way JB mentioned: we connect elements that we see from our POV, like nodes.

[oahda]

If you're already rendering the map as one texture with a distortion effect, can't you just include the markers in that texture to distort them along with the rest?

Or am I missing something?

[Torchkas]

Yeah it looks ugly that the markers aren't syncing up.

I like the map system though. I don't think complicated maps should be a concern at all, as long as you introduce the player to them properly.

[Crispy75]

The world wasn't designed to be mapped and it shows :-/

I like the slow reveal, and the distortion, but the silhouettes are too fussy and the layering just breaks my brain. Maybe it's becase I'm not in control, but it feels really confusing. I'd have a hard time actually plotting a route.

EDIT: I think the semi-transparent overlay doesn't help. Maybe make the solid areas of the map solid black, and only reveal the "real world" in the void areas (faded out though). If you can somehow get all rooms on one plane, tone down the detail (like do a 1/4 resize nearest neighbour and touch it up by hand), and increase the contrast between solid and void, I think I'd shut up about it :D

[Christian]

The world wasn't designed to be mapped and it shows :-/

I like the slow reveal, and the distortion, but the silhouettes are too fussy and the layering just breaks my brain. Maybe it's becase I'm not in control, but it feels really confusing. I'd have a hard time actually plotting a route.

Honestly I don't think a map is completely necessary. I never felt like I needed one while exploring, only when I needed to get back to a shelter. I found that after several ventures, I had a good understanding of main rooms in a region and where they connected to several other rooms. Distinctive room shapes and landmarks helped me make those connections. I still remember that in Surburban that climbing up the upper vents in the early room with the spears adjacent to the bat nest room takes you to a major vent junction, and where the vents take you from there. And I haven't played the alpha in a few weeks

If there was a way to highlight which vents take you to the most recent shelter you encountered, I think that could that work pretty efficiently.

[tortoiseandcrow]

I avoided that vent junction like the plague, because I could never remember where they all went, and it was always crawling with lizards. I've been pretty firmly in the "no map" camp, but perhaps I'd break it out for that. Although, that wouldn't help too much with all the lizards around...

[Saijin_Naib]

Would heatmapping be something you could apply to the map to further make the map feel more organic and like recalling a memory?

Currently, it sounds like you have a simple binary mask (revealed/hidden), but I'm wondering if you couldn't also make a heatmap using some color depth (4-bit? 8-bit?) that would represent the number of times SlugCat was in a given room. The more times in a given room, the higher the value of the heatmap for that location. The heatmap would be how "fresh" that room is in SlugCat's memory. You could also normalize the frequency of visits with the time since visit, thus allowing for "rot" of memory of that location.

By combining the binary mask and the heatmap, you'd have a recall system that instead of spreading outwards in a linear fashion would reveal the most "fresh" or remembered regions by the SlugCag first, and then, after struggling, SlugCat would then slowly recall other locations that perhaps it visited infrequently or a very long while ago.

[jamesprimate]

eh, its important to note that what you are seeing in these gifs is mockup maps that Joar threw together based on the old (pre-polish) region layout paradigm. We havent even started putting the maps together in a clear manner, so these are intended to show the functionality of the map code (which is AWESOME) rather than examples of the finished product. Further, the map tools allow us to orient the room positions any way we wish, with up to 3 layers of depth if necessary, so im pretty confident that we can find clear solutions.

its true that any map with be complex though. the world isnt aligned on a 2d plane (and *cant* be), so if a map is to be usable at all, it will have to have depth and 3dimensionality.

Imagine the Fez map:



but literally 10x times larger and more complex. AND we need a much higher visual fidelity if we want the map to serve any utility at all. Its a tall order.

[Torchkas]

The Fez map wasn't very good though since you had no idea about which door went to what place until you actually stood in front of it and saw the little pop-up of the next area.

Anyway, have you considered a clearer way of defining which "layer" of map you're on? Like a color code or a number or something.

[JLJac]

Yeah, there is still a lot of work to do! Maybe I kind of rushed ahead in posting those gifs of the fully revealed map of a fully un-polished region - looking at it again with your eyes it does look very confusing  These gifs were to show off a technical implementation, not the content of the map, which will make a big difference. A few notes that may address some of your concerns:

The map will be mostly on a 2D plane - as many of the rooms as possible will be fitted next to each other. The multiple layers will be for some edge cases and the occasional secret passage branching off from a main 2D map. Hopefully this will feel exciting rather than confusing, imagine finding a passage that leads to a little secret area that is "off the map" so to speak.

The movement of the map in that very short gif is really hard to follow. When you are in control of it yourself it comes across as way less hysterical - especially the layer switching is a looooot easier to understand when you have pushed a button yourself to make it happen.

Once we have the rooms placed in a sensible manner, the map textures will get a manual touch-up to make them appear more like a cohesive whole rather than a bunch of disconnected little blocks.

The fog of war really helps to make it understandable. I was showing the map to my dad, and initially he had the same impression as you guys - that it was an overwhelming information overload. Then I tried to turn the fog of war on and move through a few rooms, after which I brought the map up again. He was able to make sense of it because he had seen all the areas I had been running through and could recognize them on the map. This made him change his opinion about it quite a lot!

As for the complexity, many of the regions are insanely complex! Talking about complexity here, not geographical disconnectedness - the former we want to keep, the latter we want to work with. We're fans of the complexity and size, it drives home an emotional point about the relentlessness of Rain World and the smallness of the slugcat. The vast size and sprawling nature of the regions is something we think of as a core aspect of the atmosphere of the game. We'd like the map to reflect and visualize that aspect. Which, of course, shouldn't get in the way of actual playability, so if it does we will definitely take measures to make it easier.

End of the day, I think it's pretty hard for any of the parties involved here to judge. James made the rooms, I made the map, and you guys have a 4 second gif of an unfinished chaotic region to look at which you can't control yourself but which just pans around frantically (my bad!). When we have a player going in fresh in a finished region with fog of war on and uncover it themselves, that would be a better measure of its utility. Depending on the outcome of that scenario we'll make the necessary edits to have the map be both an artful representation of the world and a useful tool for playing the game.

As for now, I have to move on to some creature implementation, as map progress can't really proceed much further until we have some polished regions. But don't worry guys, we will make the map cool and useful  Not gonna let you down!

[JLJac]

If you're already rendering the map as one texture with a distortion effect, can't you just include the markers in that texture to distort them along with the rest?

Or am I missing something?

I'm not drawing the map texture's color to the screen, rather its pixels are color coded on the separate rgb channels to signify some different aspects (solid/open, presence of water, etc). Also the map is 1/4th resolution, so stuff like a perfect circle couldn't be drawn in it.

Yeah it looks ugly that the markers aren't syncing up.

I like the map system though. I don't think complicated maps should be a concern at all, as long as you introduce the player to them properly.

Yuuup, still haven't figured that math out completely. Will return to it.

Anyway, have you considered a clearer way of defining which "layer" of map you're on? Like a color code or a number or something.

Might be a good idea! Mostly I'd like to solve it by having the layer switching not be much of a concern - most of the map should be in layer 1, and when you do go to layer 0 or 2 there should ideally be a chunk of region in that same layer so in most cases you have the relevant information in the same layer displayed by default as you bring the map up. You will of course be able to switch between the layers, but there shouldn't be a significant amount of browsing between the z-layers. It should not be like flicking through a file cabinet, but rather just the occasional jump in or out to follow one path or another.

[Teod]

The Fez map wasn't very good though since you had no idea about which door went to what place until you actually stood in front of it and saw the little pop-up of the next area.

Actually there was a simpler way. Each level has 4 sides you can look at it from and each of those perspectives has another level in the background on the horizon. The door that is visible from this side will lead you to the level that is visible from this side. Only exceptions are doors that lead up, down and actually inside of buildings.

Rain World map looks pretty good to me. Detailed enough to be recognizable, yet a little bit abstract too. And I like the fog of war slow revealing thing.

[kizmarh]

I was rather sceptical about the map at first, but then seeing the reveal animation and thinking about the fog of war thing made me understand it. Now I love it, it would be nice to wait for when it would be used with the refactored regions.