City names on map in Tram station

[LadyStealth]

Hi dev team,

 

I was wondering if you've ever considered putting the City names on the map in the Tram station?  I'm no longer a noob, and have figured out how to use the map feature within the game.  However, I think it could be handy, should new players happen to notice it as I did, as it would / could facilitate navigation in the game.

 

Thanks for considering this, and have a great day!

[TheMoneyMaker]

There are new players?

[Greycat]

I don't know how "high resolution" that would be, really, to allow that. (Also they're more neighborhoods, not "cities." )

 

Plus, if you're at all familiar with the zones themselves, some are pretty obvious. I'm sure you can pick up where Indy Port (and thus Terra Volta,) Peregrine, Talos, etc. are, for instance. (Probably not as *immediately* obvious that Salmanca/Croatoa is in the upper left.)

 

[Psyonico]

1 hour ago, Greycat said:

I don't know how "high resolution" that would be

 

I think this is the issue right here, the textures in this game are fairly low resolution, so I don't know if it would be feasible to add text.

[LadyStealth]

6 hours ago, TheMoneyMaker said:

There are new players?

<LadyStealth hopes no  one looks in her direction as she never heard of the game before this year.>

[LadyStealth]

2 hours ago, Greycat said:

I don't know how "high resolution" that would be, really, to allow that. (Also they're more neighborhoods, not "cities." )

 

Apologies, the map that I can pull up using 'M' says "city / zones", I didn't know they were neighbourhoods.  Thanks for the information. 

[TheMoneyMaker]

17 minutes ago, LadyStealth said:

<LadyStealth hopes no  one looks in her direction as she never heard of the game before this year.>

<🤔 Looking at you 😁>

 

Welcome aboard, though you have my sincere condolences for not being around to enjoy the game throughout it's glorious history.

On the other hand, you were spared the merciless shutdown and absence the rest of us suffered until HC brought it back.

[LKN-351]

I don't have any map files converted so I'm not sure the resolution of the citymap the game uses but this exists so it's doable with client side mods.

I thought Vidiotmaps changed the file for the citymap in the trams but I just checked ingame and that's not the case any more. ATC is busy at the moment with IRL issues, I could take a crack at it but it'll be a couple weeks.

[AboveTheChemist]

6 hours ago, LKN-351 said:

I thought Vidiotmaps changed the file for the citymap in the trams but I just checked ingame and that's not the case any more.

 

Correct, vidiotmaps used to include an annotated version of the map texture visible in the tram lobby, but I removed it. It was more or less identical in appearance to the annotated city map visible from the 'City' tab in the map window, with a vidiotmaps legend and some other text explaining some symbols seen on vidiotmaps.

 

One of the reasons I removed it is that, in the context of the tram lobby, the texture made no sense. Call it immersion breaking or whatever, it didn't make sense to have the vidiotmaps legend show up in the game world like that. The more important reason is that the map in the tram lobby is a game world texture subject to the 'World Texture Quality' graphics setting. Meaning that if your 'World Texture Quality' setting was on the low end, the map in the tram lobby was low resolution and the text was nearly unreadable. The version that shows up in the map window doesn't have that issue because map window textures always display at their highest possible resolution (they are uncompressed and have no mipmaps, for those that know what those are). You could try to get around that texture quality issue by supplying an uncompressed tram map texture and/or one without mipmaps, but I am not sure that wouldn't cause issues/crashes in the game, since the game is expecting a compressed texture with mipmaps. I'll just say I wouldn't get your hopes up with that potential solution.

 

The tram map and the map in the 'City' tab of the map window both have a resolution of 512x512. For those that might want to tinker with it, it lives in:

 

data\texture_library\MAPS\city\citymap.texture

 

Needless to say I won't be altering vidiotmaps to include a new tram map mod, but if someone else wants to give it a go as a separate mod, feel free and I am happy to offer assistance if you get stuck.

 

Edited October 15 by AboveTheChemist
typo