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Magician Joined: 13 Oct 2000 Posts: 463

What games are you hoping for or do you have planned for the future? Personally I'm all over Final Fantasy XI, and zExplorer support would be fantastic for that. FFXI is more like Everquest than Asheron's Call... many custom maps, rather than a few large overworlds.

What determines the games you support? Is it based more on the games you prefer to play yourself, or is is more about how easy it is to impliment?

Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2004 8:26 pm

It's partly based on the games I play, and partly based on the map structure for the game. zExplorer is much better suited to the "world" maps like AC, Horizons, Star Wars, etc, rather than the "zone based" maps like Everquest and FFXI. Certainly the zone based maps are possible (after all, zExplorer has zones), but they are a *lot* more work since each zone needs a background image of some kind.

I spent a lot of time, for example, on Dark Age of Camelot, but it took so long to get the background terrain images for each zone that I eventually gave up, figuring it was an old game and people had plenty of other maps available.

Now, after saying that, what actually even made the DAoC maps possible at all was that someone figured out how to extract the terrain data from the game files to product nice background images. All I had to do was adopt their perl script to what I needed for zExplorer. Something like this is a necessity for any zone-based game...I wouldn't even consider doing map support without that. The reason is that zone-based games often are adding zones (expansion packs, etc) so there needs to be a straight forward way to generate the background images for any new zones that are added. Then, if I don't play the game myself, there needs to be a web site somewhere that shows how the zones are linked together.

So, if someone had a way to extract the terrain for the zones in FFXI, then it might be possible. I don't personally have any plans to play FFXI myself since I don't have time to deal with grouping and really only play MMORPGs that strongly support solo play.

Finally, it is also possible for someone else to put up a database server for a game. The latest version of zExplorer and zMapper should have all of the features needed for zone-based maps. The ability to create hot-spots on the map that can be double-clicked to open another zone was added to the last versions of zExplorer for SWG support. And when I did the Horizons database, I stricly used zMapper to create the map and then used the PHP/MySQL scripts that are available to host the database. I need to write up a "how-to" guide, but if someone was really gung-ho about hosting the map database for FFIX, I could probably be pursuaded to help get it working and document it.

As you know from my New years letter, my main focus this year is on the email client. The only MMORPG on the horizon that I'm planning to support at this time is probably Worlds of Warcraft, but we'll probably be lucky to see that by the fall.