Cartography 101 - Chapter 1

Chapter 1: Getting the Lay of the Land

First of all, we need to design a template of our web pages. But the format will depend on the Lay of the Land. I've gotten the Avernum 1 Maps from Silver Harloe and I have used them as a model for my own Avernum 2 Maps. Rache took a completely different direction with Avernum 3; in fact, after she completed one direction, she took another completely different direction. These worked well for the indoors/outdoors system of Exile/Avernum 1-3. But when Avernum 4 came out with its flat two-layered approach, I had to work out a different solution. This system works well for Avernum 5 and Avernum 6 also.

The Exile trilogy is more closely modeled like the First Avernum Trilogy, with an array of outdoor sections that you can navigate to adjoining sections, and towns that 'zoom in' to give greater detail. For this project I think my template for Avernum 2 works pretty nicely, but instead of the table of individual graphics for the main map, I'll paint a single map and use the <map></map> tags to provide the linkage like I did for the Second Avernum Trilogy. Actually, I learned that trick from Rache's Second version of Avernum 3.

First things first; how high and how wide is the map? Play through the game once to completion, then find one corner and walk in one direction, counting map shifts. Then go across the other direction doing the same. Actually, there are three separate areas that are joined by travelling underground. Here's what I've plotted so far; Valorim is a grid of 7 sections wide (E-W) and 10 sections high (N-S). Upper Exile is a grid of 2 wide and 3 high with one piece sticking out to the north. Finally, the Vahnatai Caves are a 4x4 grid.

If I build a template picture for these layouts, they look like this. Note that I've already gotten a few graphics in place. In addition to having the <map> tags defined including hyperlinks, I also have built the framework of pages below this. Don't try to navigate from section to section; the links are just dummy links to act as place holders.

Notice my naming scheme for the outdoor sections. They start with M for the main map, U for Upper Exile, and V for Vahnatai. The Northwest corner is the base of the map, being designated M00. The first digit is the X coordinate which starts at 0 and increments as you go East. The second digit is the Y coordinate, and increases as you go South. (Yes I know that in algebra that is actually the minus direction with respect to the Point of Origin, but in terms of array structures in most computer languages, this the right way to do this.) The names for the sections are what you see on the bottom of the game screen. Towns don't have prefixes, but some have multiple levels. Therefore they may have an L1 or L2 suffix to indicate that.