Will be moving the blog to the http://www.bloodmoongames.com website. am in the process of making a new site where the Bloodmoon Games RPG content is a section of the main site.

So keep your eyes peeled ;-)

Found a few issues with some of the links then made some more have to fix them tonight

I've been looking at the different tech and haave decided that java is the way forward for me. I'm still thinking through the way that I will build the maps a lot of people are making them a set size and then build a large file that stores all the information.

My solution will be similar as in that I will have a lot of information that will represent the map data but that is because I want to generate the maps once and use multiple. For example in 3D, or a tiled based game.

So to reduce the size of the information being loaded by the tile based game. I will store the information in layers the first being the land tile information I will store in an image if I use 8bits I'll have 256 tiles which is way too little to cover everything so I'll use 24bit images.

This first layer can be used as a mini map in the game the next layer will be height the next will be object locations.

Cities, town, villages, caves, ....

Will have a tile icon to represent them by moving over a (object) layer point we will load a new map.

I've still got to figure out how I will represent a road running by a river by which I mean that the tiled game might be one tile for one thousand points on the map or ten thousand points but a river and road might be only 80 points apart.

So I've been looking at different tech to render the map and have decided that I need to render it in a tiled based format I've looked at ISO, hex and square based tile maps I'll start building a square based map soon and just have to decide if ill get back up to speed with java or learn sliverlight

I really need to figure out a better gfx tech for the maps, with 90,000+ points and that's just the start. It's already having problems rendering the content.

The AJAX and SVG that. I am using aren't really up to the job of handling the amount of data. At the minute I've worked out how to scale the map properly that was the hard part.

My next step is to make the algorithm faster I can do this by using SQL and storing all the points in a DB. But is that the best way? I eventually want a 3D interface for the data.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

I've updated the map now to have points of interest use an icon similar to the Google maps place icon when you mouse over the icon you will see the name of the place. I've tried to have the icon be a click able link but it won't let me click the link just reloads the map centered on that point.

I've added four points at the moment but will add more once more of the countries are defined. And I'll add a page to my projects section to talk about the map tool. I've embedded the map in three pages at the minute and will continue to embed it into more of the wiki pages as time goes by.

I've just got version 1 the Globe Map finished. Well it seems to be stable though I still have to enter all the polygon information for the map. You can zoom in and out of the map and pan. The current map holds the coast of one of the continents. My eventual aim is to have multiple maps throughout the wiki.

I've just rolled out the complete site using the molecular engine all pages are now running through molecular. This means that I can start to work on getting the map tool published. While there are currently only 87 thousand points plotted My test environment is able to render the map. Unfortunately some of my tinkering has broken the map tool. Basically what is happening is that when you click on the map it calculates the point on the full scale map that you are and then renders that block scaled to the magitude that you are currently using but for some reason its rendering a completely different point off the map.

Once I have this fixed I will be able to generate multiple maps for the Swords & Scrolls knowledge base.