Everyone who has spent more than an hour in MRA knows that finding your way around can be excruciating at times. Hence…
THE MRA MAPPING PROJECT
The goal here is to provide correct and easy-to-access maps of general areas of the mystic realms of Alhanzar. The PTB did poorly in their cartography skills (or at least in making it public), so the job has been left to us. There are several ways to approach this, in varying levels of difficulty and complexity:
Easy on the player, hard on the organizer
The simplest way is to simply walk the entire land taking screenshots of every possible square. It is then left up to a poor group to manually take each picture and merge them into a giant map of Alhanzar. There are several disadvantages to this, including:
- The presence of any critters/corpses/NPCs in the screenshots
- The painstaking task of combining the large world that is Alhanzar
- Requires a vast collaboration, possibly beyond the scope of those available
Hard on the developer, easy on the player, hard on the organizer
A more complicated way is to sniff all incoming packets to a client and determine how the client constructs a map out of server data and texture data. There are problems with this approach as well:
- Developing such a program takes time, intelligence, and quite possibly is not allowed by MeNo as the process of creating it would reveal possible exploitable facts about the server/client interaction
- Someone still has to combine the photos/data into a full map
Easy on us, hard on MeNo
An always-available option is to simply beg MeNo for map data. This has very obvious issues:
- MeNo probably would not agree to releasing such valuable information
- MeNo himself would have to take all the map data and turn them into images, which someone would still have to merge together
- MeNo would have to take the time to decide which maps to release and which to keep to himself
So, you can see our dilemma. Please discuss our options!
