KoDP clan zones labelled in this zoomed-in view

The approach we used for King of Dragon Pass’s map worked pretty well, so I expect to be using it again. If only I knew what it was…That is, I know how the King of Dragon Pass map works, but not how to make it.The map tracked where clans were, and what you had explored. Exploration was represented by a hexagonal grid. (Coincidentally, the hexes are the same size as the Dragon Pass board game map, or Guide to Glorantha . They’re positioned for game convenience though, and don’t try to align with any published map’s hexes.) A hex was considered explored or not. The map was drawn by first drawing the unexplored map (the memory of your ancestor’s time in Dragon Pass). Then the detailed map, masked to show only the explored hexes, is drawn on top. Finally, any labels (such as clan or tribe names) are drawn.Clans were positioned in one or more zones, irregular shapes that conform to the topography. At the start of the game, clans occupy contiguous zones, though occasionally this can change during play. Zone assignments weren’t completely fixed, though for example the Colymar tribe’s clans started out in one of the nine zones of the Nymie Vale. Note that there are spare zones at the northeast of the map, intended for clans that enter the game during play.There are also zones used for exploration, so any expedition to say Snakepipe Hollow can result in the appropriate scene or news.As data structures, zones consist of some metadata (name, whether the zone is along a river), a list of neighboring zones, positioning info, and a Windows Bitmap object defining the shape. This is all saved in a map file. Although the iOS version improved how zones are shaded, the basic data is exactly the same as the CD version we shipped in 1999.Partly that’s because I have no idea how we made the data file! I still have a bunch of old tools (like a scene decompiler, which was used early in testing and abandoned), but nothing that creates the map. I know that Shawn Steele wrote the tool, but I don’t know how each zone was defined. Presumably there were .bmp files for each of the 122 zones, but I really don’t know for sure.I’m currently in the middle of working on the new map, so I reviewed all the existing code (and added a quick way to visualize zones, as seen above). This post summarizes the starting point. Once the new system is done, I’ll describe what changed.