I'm going to be dropping the automap from the upcoming release; reason why is that it's just not playing nice with some of the more recent code changes and needs a row-back and re-think in a few places. Until then I'd rather not have it at all than have a buggy half-working implementation.
I'm interested in knowing if there's actually any need to bring it back at all. Is it a feature that people actually feel they need, or is it just a novelty thing that you look at once and then forget about?
The current schedule for this is that the release is going to happen over the next coupla days, so stay tuned.
If you've been commenting on posts and have noticed the comments disappearing, you should be aware that Blogger now has an automated spam filtering service which seems to have trapped quite a few posts as false-positives. I've only just become aware of this, and will be reviewing it from time to time to make sure that nothing gets caught in it. It's a bit of a pain that I can't opt out of it (I don't get any spam anyway) but them's the breaks. Anyway, I've let through all posts that have been trapped by it to date, and will be doing so each time I review it going forward (unless it's donkey porn, of course).
3 comments:
The automap is more of a novelty. I think id didn't include it in the first place because they couldn't come up with a 3D automap that wasn't terribly confusing.
There's a couple of options, none of them very good:
1) A 3D wireframe like Descent. Very confusing; easy to get lost.
2) A 2D slice like DirectQ. Very limited usefulness, IMO.
3) Handcrafted automaps. Lots of work for the level designer.
That pretty much chimes with my own opinion of it. It was a nice novelty but with limited usefulness in a 3D game. For more or less 2D maps (like e1m1) it's OK, but as soon as you start playing a mostly vertical map (e3m7 is a good example) it's useless. Not dangerously useless, just plain boring old useless.
I'd agree with you on the 3D wireframe; I'd have a very hard time seeing that being anything other than hopelessly confusing.
Glad to see that the spam filter didn't catch you this time by the way! :)
Actually I do use the automap feature quite often.. mainly just to see if there are any weird out of bounds "secret" locations on any map (so far mostly used on multi-player maps)..
It can also be used to generate a neat layout overview of a map to be used for whatever by mappers..
OK, I can live quite happily without it but I'd like to see it return at some stage ;)
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