After a couple of false starts, and a Photoshop crash (while saving) that caused me to lose a day and a half of work, I’m pleased to announce that the first and second major landmarks for creating the map resources has been reached. What follows is an overview of those two landmarks, what they entail and their purpose.

Landmark #1: Reference Screens

In order to accurately line up the parchment maps with the terrain, scaling while eying it up was not going to work. So the first step was to take screenshots of both the radar/mini-map and the parchment at key positions in each zone and sub zone. To make this easier, I elected to go with a custom UI skin that stripped the border, buttons, and hope/dread overlays. Then, with the unobstructed terrain image visible, I removed all the markers that I could, leaving just the red “avatar” triangle and the unremovable town arrows.

From there, I proceeded to go to each zone in the game, taking 4-6 pairs of screenshots – and then doing the same for each sub-zone. For instance, Bree-land, which has a total of six sub-zones (Bree-town, Archet, Bree-land Homesteads, North Barrow Downs, South Barrow Downs and Old Forest) resulted in a grand total of 60 screenshots alone!

Once this was done, the resulting screenshots had to be prepared in Photoshop to make them a bit easier to use. The first step was to combine all the points for each parchment map into a single map – showing multiple position markers per map. The second step was to prepare the radar map screenshots for the next phase. This was done by loading all the radar map screenshots per zone into one Photoshop document, then removing everything but the radar map itself, before cropping the image to that size. This part was repeated for each main zone, leaving a total of 19 Photoshop files.

Landmark #2: Terrain Position Markers

This phase is the immediate preparation for actually scaling and lining up the parchment maps to the terrain maps. The goal here was to take all the radar images that were saved previously, and line them up exactly with the huge (43,200px X 30000px) terrain map I assembled from LotRO’s in-game map tiles. Since both the map, and the radar use the same source, the scaling was perfect – and accurate placement was fairly simple.

That being said, it was time consuming to place each of the 200-ish radar circles on the map. Moria alone contained a total of 54 of these! The first attempt at this failed spectacularly, when saving the project just prior to doing the Moria markers. I was working in alphabetical order by zone, so of the 19 zones, I had already completed 14 of them, before Photoshop crashed during writing the file. Thankfully I had saved a copy of my tile map the day before, so while it was missing the last tiles to be added (Frostbluff and Zirak Zigl) and the markers, it had the vast majority of the completed map finished. Believe it or not, this was a lot more important than you would think; but I’ll get into exactly why, at the end here.

At any rate, after that disaster, I started saving two copies of the map itself, as well as individual saves for each group of markers – so that if it happened again, I’d just be losing an hour or two’s worth of work, instead of days. Shortly before writing this, I finished placing the last marker (in the Trollshaws) and now I’ll be getting ready to do the last major step – calculating the scale each parchment map needs to be, by comparing the distance between the farthest markers, between the parchment maps and the terrain map, then, scaling and placing the parchment maps so they line up.

About the Tiles

One would think that the in-game map tiles would be organized – preferably by zone, if not ordered by number. The reality is…kinda. For the most part the tiles are in order by zone, and generally, in order by when those zones were added to the game. However, it appears that whenever a zone is changed – whether it be from a revamp, or Turbine deciding they need better looking tiles, the original tiles are removed, and new ones are added (numerically) later. This could mean that the majority of one zone’s tiles are all in one range, but one section is later, and a few of the tiles appear somewhere even later. Needless to say, it can be a real headache sifting through some odd 13,000 tiles to find the ones you need. Because of this bizarre tile order, I decided to create a small script to help me find some of the more hard to recognize or hard to find tiles. This script would take a 202×202 image, that contained the edges of the border tile(s) surrounding the tile I was looking for. The script would then compare the color of the pixels on each edge to the corresponding edge of each map tile, and spit out a list of the most likely matches. With the possibilities reduced, picking out the correct tile was easy. Of course, this did take a  good 3 minutes or so to run, so creating the entire map like that would be ridiculous.

To add insult to injury, some of these tiles have numerous versions. For instance, there is no fewer than 3 different tile sets for Isengard – and that’s not even including the one set used for the Session Play. The trouble is, that unless you actually compare it to the one that’s being used in-game, that there’s really no way to tell which one is the correct one. Because of this, I ended up replacing four of the tiles in Isengard in the process of adding the markers – but mostly because it was so noticeable. A good half of the Gap of Rohan also has a different set of tiles – but as of now they haven’t been replaced – mostly because the only difference was the length of shadow, with no actual difference in detail. So this is pretty much why I’m really thankful I didn’t have to start from scratch – assembling the original map took me a good 2-3 weeks. Perhaps, somewhere there is some kind of “key” that the game uses to find the correct tiles to use. This would probably be helpful if I can find it – especially when new zones are added.

At any rate, that’s the story so far. Hopefully, by the end of the week, all the parchment maps will be scaled and placed, and work can begin on the final step – blending the parchment maps together. I haven’t quite decided on what I’m going to do with the “empty” areas on the terrain map yet – meaning the areas that the parchment map covers, that there are no tiles. The choice pretty much boils down to either doing what Turbine did with their Google Map and fill the blank areas in with parchment, while “shaping” the borders to fit the bounds of the actual area, or just leaving it as tiles, and putting “blank” tiles wherever they’re needed.

While the potential usefulness of the LotROMaps plugin was hard to deny, the harsh reality of the limitations of the current Plugin system and API had sealed its fate before it ever saw anything more. Between the need for significant local storage, and thanks to LotRO’s handling of loaded images, the unstoppable memory usage, not even its potential could make it feasible.

That being said, I’ve always thought that this would be the ultimate method of delivering a map utility. It takes the single-zone user friendliness of the default in-game map and such useful sites as ruslotro and MEHQ, and combines it with the flexibility and potential accuracy of the zoomable, bi-layered Turbine Google Map. Combine that with the concept of making full use of such a zoom function, by melding sub-zone parchment maps with its parent zone, and you have yourself the perfect questing/navigation aid.

However, since the plugin idea wasn’t going to work, and making it web-based would hurt its usefulness for anybody who isn’t running multiple monitors, while in windowed mode, it started to look like this idea was never going to have a home. That is, until I noticed how frequently my Android device sat on my desk, well within arms reach. At that point, there was no doubt that mobile devices would be the ideal platform for this concept. Even with that figured out, there remained at least one major issue.

The terrain tiles of the Lothlorien map, that was featured in the plugin concept, were created via assembling and re-chopping the terrain tiles from the Turbine Google Map. Meaning, in order to create a zone, I had to depend on Turbine to add that zone to their map.  Considering this is already four months after the release of Rise of Isengard, and none of those zones have been added, this was not the most reliable of methods. Not only that, but the terrain map doesn’t even include areas such as Frostbluff, or Zirakzigil, nor (obviously) any instances. I needed a more reliable source of terrain tiles, and there’s nothing more reliable than the actual in-game minimap tiles.

With some degree of luck, all my numerous attempts to get to the bottom of the .dat file format, and searches for utilities from others who might have had better luck, my persistence finally paid off.  After finding DAT_UNPACKER by Dancing on a Rock Hacker, I finally had the reliable method I needed to get the resources I required. Now it’s time to make use of those resources, and bring LotROMaps to  life.