Friday Dev Update: A Closer Look At Cartography

12:20 PM Unknown 3 Comments





The cartography update is underway . This week, I want to discuss a little bit of what to expect with regards to the new mapping functionality coming in the next major update.





Marking Your Map



The core of the map functionality is actually very simple. Initially the map will be blank. It is up to you to mark the map however you see fit. In addition to marking where islands are in the world, there will be a number of other map mark icons available to you that you can place on top of the islands. For instance, if an island contained pirates, you can mark it with a pirate icon.





Sharing Your Map



Many players enjoy making their own maps of the Salt world, and they have been doing so on paper or third party apps. This system intends to take the same philosophy of hand-drawn maps and provide an in-game system to accomplish the same goal.





There are many players who prefer to reference maps that other people have made, and on the flip side, there are players who get a lot of enjoyment out of making maps with the intent to share with other people. We will make it fairly easy to transfer map data by having each game’s map data stored in a single file, which players can exchange.





Another thing to note is that the map data itself will be stored in a commonly used plain text format called JSON. This means that third party apps and websites will be able to easily read map data .





Map Customization



In addition to icons in the map, we plan to add the ability to make custom notes tied to islands as well. This is something that ties in heavily with the Player Journal, which is something that is planned for a future update. Being so, the custom note functionality of the map will be released along with the Player Journal update instead of this one.







We will continue to keep you updated with the progress and features of the map update as development continues.