Automap

[hhas]

MCR’s enhanced environments will improve visual navigation via greater use of visually distinctive landmarks and environmental narrative—e.g. a map section dressed as HAB that leads to a section dressed as SCI which leads to a section dressed as ENG creates a memorable progression—reducing accidental backtracking and reliance on Automap for navigation.

That said, we will still include some form of Automap as a significant Classic gameplay feature (e.g. it shows BOBs’ locations on Rescue levels).

Or Automap will not replicate the original exactly:

• The map must be a translucent overlay (as in AO) so it does not block the in-world view.

• Whereas the original fixes map orientation and rotates the player arrow, our player arrow always points upwards and the 2D map rotates around it. This eliminates AO’s motion sickness effect where the translucent 2D map slides sideways or backwards as the Player runs forwards.

• We will probably use a simplified 2D render of the level (information), omitting nooks and crannies (visual noise) of the new, more detailed 3D architecture. This could be as simple as a “ball and stick” representation of the level’s room+corridor topology, though will probably be a roughly to-scale representation of the general floorplan with unimportant detail simplified or omitted.

• We might forego the original 2D map’s “line-of-sight construction”, where walls do not appear unless and until the Player looks at them. We could recreate this effect, e.g. using 2D raycasting in the 2D geometry, but if showing the entire 2D room upon entry does not significantly change gameplay then that is much simpler to implement.

• We might incorporate any map fragments and checkpoint locations that the user has previously read in a Terminal.

• On Explore maps, include an objective counter so that users know how many of the required locations they have visited and how many remain to be discovered before they can exit the level.

• When navigating stacked rooms, rooms on other floors should have higher translucency/different colors/be omitted to improve legibility of the current floor.

Notes

First step is to gather examples of more recent FPS automaps for comparison, determine what is improved in their designs, and decide which of those improvements are appropriate to MCR’s retromodern gameplay and aesthetic, then update this ticket to a requirements list for implementation.

Features which are not applicable to Arrival (e.g. Explore counter) can be deferred until after Demo.

References

https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/inside-the-intricate-world-of-video-game-cartography/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1Tczf8vxCM

[yaelatletl]

We can recreate these effects, fog of war is just a bunch of masks, and we can do it quite easily if we get some clipping, our map will most likely be 3d internally and displayed as 2d, rendered from another camera anchored to the player