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SacredWiki Interactive Map of Ancaria


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That's exactly what we're going to aim for Llama. I've been getting a lot of guidance from Pitunia about getting scripts in order and setting up the darkmatters server to send only the images that can fit on a users screen. Excellent way to save on bandwidth for us and a much faster expiernce for people viewing the map. Same idea as what we have with the Sacred UW map actually but at the moment I have some limitations being that the UW map is hosted at MapLib.net. Dimensions and file size being the restrictions. There's also a lot more I could do with the map(s) once they are hosted with us.

 

The Sacred 2 map has been completed in that all the puzzle pieces have been placed. Though I've kind of gotten caught up with marking it now which has slowly grown into an obsession for me. So it should be done in ooooooh.... 2 years? lol. Actually a lot of my time has been taken up by work lately. Things have quieted down at work now so I'll be able to get the map up soon! Ish?

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Smile yourself Schot... Now my boyfriend is testing some scripts he wrote today ;) They cut images extracted from Sacred2 PAK folders, name them and need only script which can display them. And this using Google API is already written :hugs: Now only start script and check if they do work with images correct :) But png isn't good solution for server... Biggest layer (from 7 layers - 7 levels of zoom) have more than 16.000 of 256x256 images :( So on disc all images from all layers in png would take more than 2GB. And number of files reach almost 33000. JPG have worse quality, but on-line page with map from PNG-files could be veeery slow ;)

 

[EDIT]Everything done without problem :) Scripts works for Sacred 2 and their tiles long but flawless :P After all there is 24416 PNG-files which take 1487,5 MB :P

JPG with 70% compression level... only 141,7 MB, which could be acceptable I think :P Remember, that at one time, one person download on 512x512 display only 4 images, and when zoom in, zoom out or move... download only uncached tiles. Of course it takes bandwidth, but not as much as downloading single big file :)

OK... I run script to generate tiles for lvl1 underground :P

Edited by Pitunia
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Llama8... But that order is only in Sacred 2. In S1 all tiles are sorted into rhombus and displaying them isn't as easy as it looks. What more... If you want display images you must know what to display and how user can navigate. Because of that Schot choose MapLib. It's good solution but has limitations. If you don't want have them you must know how to use Google Maps API functions. It's Object JavaScript mostly (but you may also use XML, PHP, MySQL). My boyfriend is programmer (MSc of IT) so looks into code, read few manuals and examples and made working one. Later he start writing scripts to handle with images, because, as I wrote earlier, Google Maps use a tons of thumbnails 256x256 and each must be named according to pattern which is used to choosing this, which should be displayed (there is function which we first must write, define and whole displaying is based on it).

With Sacred 2 it's easy because they are nice named in files (I've described pattern before your post). But making similiar for S1 will be muuuuuuch more complicated. Maybe not impossible, but veeeeeery hard...

 

If we compare Sacred 2 and S1, work with Sacred 2 tiles was piece of cake ;) Good, that he has experience with map generator (do you like it Schot? ;) ) for S1 because at least he know everything about order in files and may try write some converter between order on google maps and S1 files. We will see how long it take :P Or rather if he will be able to write something that ;) This script for converting images from Sacred 2 has a little more than 100 lines, but 1/3 of them are comments.

Exactly 79/127 lines are working code. Rest are comments what is what and how works :P

 

And back to topic... Displaying map on page is hard, because you don't know in fact how big will be output image, depending on scale. Very detailed means huge in size... To compare I say how big is most detailed map in Sacred 2 made from tiles. Map is a square which is made from 128x128 tiles 256x256 big so... 32768x32768 :) Some of them are only blank, but whole size is as you see enormous...

 

Ok... This is how it works now. 7 levels of zoom (and level 0 as a global) display area 512x512 step by step ;)

Lvl0 is max zoom out. Google move sphere on something flat so on left and right from original they are "rolled"

 

lvl0zt9.th.pnglvl1db9.th.pnglvl2fz0.th.png

 

lvl3bq3.th.pnglvl4hw5.th.pnglvl5ta0.th.png

 

lvl6mw1.th.pnglvl7gk3.th.png

 

Look and compare. But remember... Those are png files, because I didn't wanna loose quality. Check, that most of them are 0.5MB files, and because of that I put thumbnails only. If you wanna see how it looks, click on chosen one. They are in scale 1:1 and that is how I see it on my screen.

 

And as a bonus... First and second level of underground map as a whole:

ulvl1fd6.th.png ulvl2am5.th.png

But this time only on lvl1 zoom ;)

Edited by Pitunia
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  • 4 weeks later...

Completely missed this again Pitunia. The map had me in a strangle hold, haha.

 

I'm so impressed with both your understanding of the process Pitunia. I have to admit that I have yet to be able to sit down and read carefully how the scripts are written. In fact I haven't even been able to cut up my map yet. :) MapLib is really great but as you say there are limitations that I want to move beyond. I'm looking into some alternative hosting for my map which will create this opportunity for us here at darkmatters. The first thing I need to do though is cut up a map. I think what I'll do for testing purposes is create a smallish map and host it here at darkmatters. Then test it out and customize it. Wheee, gonna be fun. :)

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  • 7 years later...

After a very long dissapearance, the Sacred Underworld Map is back! :wizard:

Sacred:Underworld Map of Ancaria

Maplib once hosted this map but long ago it shut it's doors and it's site. Life as it goes prevented this project from re-emerging. Until now. What I find most exciting by the return of this map is that while it was on Maplib it was limited to a size of 9936 x 6922 pixels. But now... Now I have it rendering at 22320 x 15495 at full zoom. Enjoy the extra details and close up all!

Aweosme Schot, the map's back home... good job

New detail on this new map IS SICK

 

:)

 

gogo

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I've caught myself just zenning out on the details on the map... makes me all nostalgic about what was going on in the gaming world when this game came out, and what I was doing, comp I was on... forums were new then, SIF was so fresh, and so busy... I remember seeing this game come out on Demo (parents got me a new computer back then, and I was demo/download crazy in those days... lordy, the viruses I spawned... :4rofl: ) and right away I my mouth dropped... being able to ride a horse, firing arrows while going around a animal in a circle, being able to switch weapons and then duel wield and see all that detailing... I remember playing that demo over and over, just couldn't get enough of it, and kept trying to go past all the boundaries...

See Schot was zenning out on this map causes!

:pirate:

 

gogo

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  • 4 years later...
3 minutes ago, Arienstarr said:

I'm 4 years late to this thread and it seems the map is offline again :-(

Anyone know where I can find either this map or another interactive map of Ancaria?

Thanks.

yeeks!

Sorry about this Arienstarr ... can you show me the link you're using to get to the map, and which browser, from cell or desktop?

:)

 

gogo

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Thanks Flix!

For some reason I cant seem to associate the link to the original sentence... but I replaced it with the link you provided for a present work around until we can look at this later.

The Map flies once again..

Arise Ancaria!!

:viking:

gogo

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You are most welcome @Arienstarr:agreed:

 

2 hours ago, Timotheus said:

Could this be related to any update to the formatting due to all the upgrades the site has seen through the times? I've noticed other links leading to a dead end, and then I noticed the links were showing .php5/ in there. Just on a hunch I removed the 5, and the link worked again. 

Genius Timo!  Thanks for that tip.  I've never liked Mediawiki's url addressing.  Our wiki urls used to be formatted as sacredwiki.org/index.php5/PAGENAME.  I think it was a couple years ago after an update that the "5" was removed.  Would love to make the time to remove the entire index.php from our urls though it's tricky from what I've read.  As well as create some redirects for the old link format.  One more thing on the to do pile, heh.  :crazy_pilot:

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2 hours ago, Arienstarr said:

PS, just realized I thanked Timotheus as your level name, not your ID name. 

Still learning the ropes around here.

It's great seeing you on the boards!

yes the post levels are unique... the table of elements... beneath all e'en Ancaria...

there is always the table

:gogo:

gogo

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  • 5 months later...
8 hours ago, Julian1213 said:

Awesome work!

Is there a possibility to download a High res Version of ther Map for private use ?

hi and welcome to DarkMatters! the map's creator Schot has placed it in the Wiki as only live use.  This way visitors clicking and using it gets to see Schot's awesome map and also helps us with our hosting costs for DarkMatters 

:gogo:

 

gogo

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  • 1 year later...
On 1/17/2008 at 3:13 PM, Schot said:

Fellow Sacred addicts. Put aside your compass for a moment and rejoice!

 

CampMapTH.jpg

A long standing project to provide a high definition map of Ancaria which is also interactive is now complete. You may now find and interact with a full map of Ancaria found on the SacredWiki page:

SacredWiki Underworld Map of Ancaria

Interacting with the map is fairly simple. To the top left you will notice some controls. The + and - signs will zoom the map in or out when you click them. The arrow signs will move the map up down left or right but an easier way to move the map around is to hold down left mouse button and drag the map around. One other way that you can move the map around would be to click on the arrow at the very bottom right of the map. Clicking on the small arrow will open a window which will give you control to move the map by clicking inside that small window. Play around and find out how it works. :)

 

Many more maps are planned to be added and with each map there will be the ability for everyone to make it grow! In the near future you will have the freedom to add map markers to the maps just like google maps. These markers when clicked upon will pop open a box that can contain text and images which will be of great use when marking a place that requires a great deal of explaining. More on that in the coming weeks.

 

For now feel free to roam around the Sacred Underworld map of Ancaria and perhaps discover something new!

 

 

How it came to be...

The map was about 3 months in the making. From thinking about it, to doing it and finally to, (more or less), completing it. Resources and bandwidth allowing, the Map of Ancaria you will find by following the link above is 9936 x 6922 in size. To give you a better idea you could also say the map is about 9 computer screens wide and 9 computer screens high, (if your resolution is set to 1024x768 and you have a 19" monitor). Or maybe better... Look at the wall in front of you and imagine a the map hanging on your wall 11.5 feet wide by 8 feet tall. That is to say. It's really freaking big! It actually never occurred as to how big it was until it was finally complete. Keep in mind that those sizes given are of the shrunken map. The actual map is more than double the size, approximately 26 feet wide by 18 feet high. Imagine that hanging on the exterior of your... House?! It's pretty darn big and much bigger than ever was initially understood. In fact had the size been fully realized before the project began it may well have never begun in the first place. Ignorance is bliss as they say.

 

Some folks who have seen the map have thought that this was a single extract straight out of the game. To those folks I say to you. Ooooh how I wish it were! The scary truth is that there was no way to have a single extract of the map. It was tried though thats for sure since I went so far as to beg Ascaron for one but it simply wasn't possible. So the long road had to be taken. First task being to have a character with a great deal of the world map uncovered. With great dismay the best that could be readily had was at a puny 17% World Discovered. So began the search for the greatest WD hero ever!

 

At this point I'd like to give special thanx to our well established WD% hero. He was of tremendous help and without him the map would be looking very different and of course a lot more "foggy". Knuckles. :) Thank you very much for the donation of at first your WD% Daemon and later the now famous "UBER GOOBer", Waterboy. Your character donation not only knocked off a lot of work for me but also made visible what was previously believed to be impossible to see or better put, impossible to remove the fog from. Thank you!

 

With Waterboy and his 97% WD, the Sacred Underworld game and Photoshop all laid out and ready to do a lot of sweating, the task of creating a high definition map began near the start of November. The steps required were relatively simple. (Well... They seem simple to me now but in truth took a lot of researching to devise.)

Enter the game with Waterboy, stay on the Haven Isle, open the "M" map, choose a section of map to work on, hold down left click on the South-west most corner of that section on the "M" map and take a screenshot. And then do it again about 942 times! Zig-zagging up and down the map. Oh and throw in about 100 extra screenshots for reasons of corrections, haha. Let me tell you it was pretty horrifying to work on the first section... After completing a section of screenshots they would be sent through a custom batch script that would automatically crop the images so as to cut out the useful part and discard the rest. Then the cropped screenshots would be imported into photoshop and positioned like puzzle pieces to complete an entire section. Once the pieces were in place various corrections would be made to have it appear seamless and without traces of a cursor over the map. A very.. very long process to say the least. Section after section in the end there were 17 individual sections which were then imported into an even larger Photoshop project to contain those sections. Again, the sections were fitted together like a puzzle to create a fully complete layout of all that is Ancaria.

 

Some things in the map you may notice are not quite as they are in game. For example the water around the Pirate Islands was touched up a bit. Of course the majority of players may never know this because there simply isn't any reason to travel across the water that is beyond the islands. For reasons of aesthetics it was tidied up. There are also many abnormalities that ARE in the real game map which was cleaned up some but those will never be noticed. Not likely anyways. And then there are the flaws in the map which you may discover because there were simply too many to correct so some have been untouched. Regardless, those flaws won't impact the usefulness of the map in any way.

 

After the map had been pieced together and cleaned up some the next task was to add the various place names and it was at this point that things became very difficult. Granted, typing out names of places and sticking them on a map is relatively simple but the problem was that the .psd file, (Photoshop project file) had grown enormously. At this point it was about 900+ MB in size. Worse still is that Photoshop when being operated creates a temporary file to maintain histories and whatnot of the project being worked on. Well whenever I opened the map project in Photoshop it quickly required a temporary file of... 9GB!? Not having any experience with a project of this size the computer in use was not quite prepared and just barely had the needed file space and ram. 2 GB of RAM was only JUST enough. Opening the project or saving it would usually take about 5 minutes to do. This was a big part of why it took as long as it did. With some research and discovery of a memory clearing trick the various place names and everything else marking the map was managed and after much running around in game the markers were at last complete. Or at least as complete as you see them now. There are certainly things that could use changing. Which brings me to MapLib markers!

 

Towards the start of the project one of the first concerns was as to how the map was going to be made available to the community. That is... How/where will it be hosted. Naturally the first things that came to mind was to host it at SacredWiki.org. Undoubtedly the bandwidth usage would shoot through the roof and so that option was quickly dispelled. The problem of hosting was put on the back burner and instead the question of interactivity was talked about. gogoblender suggested to research google maps and its API to see if there was something of use there. Sure enough after much searching MapLib was discovered. MapLib is an excellent new resource that allows registrants to upload very large images at no cost. If you pay for their Pro service then you can upload even larger images which is what we did for the map of Ancaria. The bonus here is that MapLib applies the google maps API to whatever image you upload which allows interactivity that is almost identical to google maps. A perfect solution for both the questions of interactivity and hosting of the Map of Ancaria!

Just like google maps, the map of Ancaria can have markers added to it. Although it isn't quite ready yet, guests in the near future will be able to add markers to the Maps at SacredWiki. For this map only "P.O.I."(Points of Interest) markers will be added. As for other types of markers like quests for example, these are planned for other maps which will be added to the SacredWiki and announced very soon. So keep an eye out. I'll be posting about adding markers soon!

 

Ok, so I've rambled on faaaar too long...

 

One last thank you is to DarkAngel. DarkAngel, the constructor of the German maps, is for the most part the reason I created the map of Ancaria. Seeing her work was a real inspiration! Not only is it an excellent resource for players of the Sacred game but I also find it to be one of the best looking game maps I have seen. Try to think of a better in game rpg map. I'm fairly certain you will have a very hard time thinking of one. So to DarkAngel I say thank you for the inspiration and that I now understand your pain, lol.

 

For those of you who know Ancaria very well I encourage you to delve into the map. During my travels there were a couple things there that I had never found before but because I was looking closely I stumbled across. One of which was very very well concealed among trees. You never know what you might find. wink.gif

 

For those of you who are just recently joining us in the community of Sacred there is most certainly a LOT of things you'll find handy in the map. Of them I believe the dotted paths will be of great value to you. In particular there are "secret passages" of sorts that have been dotted out for you to see.

 

The general plan is to update the master map every month so if you have suggestions what will probably happen is that once guests can make markers on the map I will check over them and add the very important ones to the map permanently while others may remain as markers only depending on their complexity. The whole marker business will of course be explained soon.

 

Cheers everyone and I hope you enjoy the map. As hard as it was I really did love making it! :)

I know this is a post from many Aeons ago, but I found this fairly recently & wanted to give my thanks & respect for all the incredible work in this.  Only now, on a new playthrough have I started really using these maps & it has so much impact on time management which is huge for some people (like me).

The maps also helped me understand the game world better, geographically, and that made the immersion much more...immersive.  I didn't get turned around nearly as often, I felt like a had a direction (pun intended) when I left a town or a fort, I mission planned ahead with these maps. loving it.  Thanks so much for the amazing work!

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  • 1 year later...

Hallo everyone! Schot has been working on the Wiki o'er last few days... and ... the Wiki Map is up and running again

:bounce: 

 

If anyone sees issues please post and we can take a look at it 

:dance: 

 

gogo

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