[Area Maps] Make Baldur's Gate one large area
Dee
Member Posts: 10,447
One of the most annoying things about the city of Baldur's Gate is the fact that it's arbitrarily divided into nine sections. In 1998, this was because it would have been too big to support all at once; but today, there's no reason why the game couldn't handle it.
I'm proposing that the nine maps of Baldur's Gate be merged into a single super-map.
It would require some renaming of areas and the relevant spots in each, but I think it would be worth it.
I'm proposing that the nine maps of Baldur's Gate be merged into a single super-map.
It would require some renaming of areas and the relevant spots in each, but I think it would be worth it.
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Comments
But there are two facets of it: first, if you make it one big map, you'll get more of a feeling that this is an enormous place; and second, it will make pathfinding easier, because you won't get stuck behind a wall trying to get to the center district from the south.
Although there could be some issues with event triggers.
It seems to me that the area art for the entirety of Baldur's gate city could easily be repartitioned together to form just 1 giant mega city map.
Now as far as I am aware there is no hard coded maximum map size limit for and area (or I might have dreamt this, whatever, I'll go with it for now). I don't know why the city was originally partitioned, so I'm just going to guess it was due to some hardware limitation which would no longer be relevant on modern machines.
So I see no reason that it *couldn't* happen.
Not only would it be a bad-ass feature or mod in its own right, it would also make ch7 a heck of a lot more interesting.
It would make the game easier for low parties as they would only have one set of flaming fist enforcers after them...
I could be wrong all this could happen outside the fog of war... Please let the triggers be not related to moving between maps!
From a map perspective it could be done, though we'd need to adjust a lot of names of doors/containers/etc. to keep them unique when combined. Where it falls down are the area scripts and all of the various area checks that would now fail--that's a much trickier problem to solve.
Also, the mini-map would be tiny as hell.
Another option would be to use a whole new engine, like Ogre3D. Using an isometric camera and a mix of 3D and 2D assets, you can create a scene which retains the old school look (albeit improved, because why not) while at the same time having dynamic lighting. You can actually pack in more detail using this method over traditional scenes where games use a perspective camera, since you don't need to worry about what players can't see in the isometric view. Well, down the road perhaps Beamdog could add markers to the map screen where players can fast travel to districts they've visited, so that we won't need to reach the edge of an area anymore when fast travelling within places like Baldur's Gate.