Exile III Maps

[IMakeMaps]

I didn't see any dumps of the maps from Exile III, so I started pulling those out of the game as well. No promises on when this will be complete, but here is a preview of things to come. The color scheme is mostly similar to the Exile I maps where yellow tiles indicate secret passages. Exile III is different in that certain secret passages are marked in the game using a special instead of a unique tile ID, so I've marked all tiles with specials as well in white. I need to add code to connect the roads, they seem to be procedurally drawn in the game. For now all roads are highlighted in green. Obviously massive spoilers in the maps.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/f6vvhyub4pnt3nb/AABo9ZApgXmQu0MJKgY_7anBa?dl=0

 

Exile III is neat because it made use of template towns. If a lot of the smaller towns seemed similar it's because Jeff used a grid of premade town chunks and pieced them together to build many of the 48x48 towns in the game. It allowed him to compress the size of the towns a bit this way. These towns also had random cosmetic effects applied to them like rotating through the different mushroom tiles, or making walls moldy. They supported drawing rectangles of tiles as well, and handled "destroying" the towns too.

 

Compared to Exile I, Exile III does a great job of not looking like a grid on the ourdoors map, and also files in the inaccessable areas with an appropriate tile, where in Exile I these areas were left blank.

 

I mostly have the maps for the towns done, there are a few tiles that I missed and will need to clean up. I am trying to see if I can get sign text added as well as the town names pulled in.

 

I loved this game, and dumping these maps brought back a lot of good memories.

[Ess-Eschas]

Excellent work once again, IMakeMaps. These are looking great already! The additions of area names and special squares is a nice touch, as is producing versions of your map with and without these features.

 

If you don’t want to reinvent the wheel with implementing the roads, Duskwolf figured out how the roads were handled in Exile II when producing their maps. They also posted all their map-generation code, which you can download from the link in this post:

 

https://spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com/topic/1234-complete-exile-2-outdoor-map-massive-spoilers/?do=findComment&comment=299464

 

I should stress that I’ve not looked at this code in detail, but I believe it includes all the material used to generate the maps. Some properties of road generation may of course have changed between games. However, at least on the surface, both Exile II and Exile III seem to use the same approach for drawing roads. So you may be able to make use of portions of Duskwolf’s code.

 

Duskwolf’s maps also incorporate terrain frills. The Exile games have a feature where frills on the edges of various types of terrain – water, pits, lava, etc. – are added in only when the game is played. They’re not present in the map files themselves, something which can be seen directly in Blades of Exile. These frills smooth the sharp transitions between, say, water and solid ground.

 

These frills aren’t so important in Exile III, since the above-ground tileset manages them differently. They’re only an issue in the caves, and in towns and dungeons. And their only real effect is to make things look pretty, so it’s probably not worth spending time worrying about them unless you really want to. Still, you might be able to port that portion of Duskwolf’s code over too, just to make your maps look even better!

 

It’s good to hear you’re progressing with the modular towns, too. There was some previous effort by Ishad Nha to produce versions of all the towns in all of their various forms straight out of the data files. However, I’m not sure if that effort was ever completed – the copy of their work that I have only includes some of the early town numbers.

 

Having a comprehensive map of all the towns in their various states would certainly be interesting to see. Not least because different players will probably have only seen towns in a few different states!

 

In any case, keep up the good work!

[IMakeMaps]

Thanks for the pointer to the old code - the frills piece should be doable. I think Exile 3 has unique tiles for frills, so it's just a matter of checking neighboring tiles for the same type and swapping out the picture.

 

The template towns are done and I should have all tiles mapped now. I need to better understand the logic for how the towns get destroyed to accurately display them in various states, as well dump their names. The major cities have unique maps for their various states of decay and are easy to draw. The template towns handle this differently. The final maps should include monsters as well. I think I can get sign text, but I'm not sure yet. Roads are properly implemented now too.

 

When I'm done I'll probably post the code to view the maps, since it will let you toggle different overlays and zoom in and out - it will be easier than dumping X versions of all towns, but I'll also dump all towns too for folks that don't want to run code or have access to the game.

[Celtic Minstrel]

12 hours ago, IMakeMaps said:

I think Exile 3 has unique tiles for frills, so it's just a matter of checking neighboring tiles for the same type and swapping out the picture.

Above-ground frills are handled that way, but underground places an overlay on top of water, lava, and pit tiles.

[IMakeMaps]

Hmm, I will have to see if I can find their graphics and drop them in. Might as well make them look as good as they can be. I'll have to check if E1 had those too

[IMakeMaps]

I put the initial dump of the towns in the link above. They show specials (in white) and monsters. Some monsters appear depending on special flags but are included in the town data (like the wandering wizard in Kriszan). The maps will show more monsters than you likely are used to because of this.

 

Still a few things to resolve with the template towns - not sure why two towns have walls around them.