xkeeper
@xkeeper

a concept that's fun to think about is an "unplace" (a term i am making up).

in most "worlds", things exist "off the map", so to speak. there might not be anything there, but it exists. if you go off the edge, you might end up nowhere, or an empty room, sure. but you can go there.

like in real life, you can technically go anywhere. everywhere exists; even if it's solid rock or empty sky, you can, in theory, move to that position and exist there.

in this world, that isn't the case. empty spots on this map do not exist, in any shape or form. you cannot go there. under no circumstances can you "boundary break" and visit one of the empty spots on this map.

(of course, this whole map is a fabrication; it does not exist in the game world.)


xkeeper
@xkeeper

consider link's awakening, above; this is eagle's tower, the seventh dungeon, from an "internal" perspective (src). the map is stored as an 8×8-byte array of room IDs. the repeated room you see everywhere is room 00; on the first underworld, it's an empty room, but in the second underworld, it ended up being a copy of the top-left corner of 1F.

what you see here is actually how this game works. if you are on one screen, and walk off of it, whether by cheating or otherwise, you will move... one screen to the right. the "empty" screens are still there, even if they're not intended to be visited. what you see is what you get.

in the case of mighty bomb jack... that isn't how it works. the "maps" people, including myself, have made, aren't actually representative of the world. much like how a 2d projection of the globe has to take some affordances to account for the loss of its 3dness, mighty bomb jack's map is a transformation of how it works into a "normal" representation.

take the labyrinth on the right. the middle, leftmost room, D1, is adjacent to D8 (right). but you cannot get to D8 from D1. i don't just mean that there's a wall there: i mean even if you were to insert a door into that wall, and go through it, you would end up in a void1, room 00. and from there, you're literally off the map -- room 00 isn't "on here", because it isn't anywhere.

to put it another way, when you're standing in D8, the only other rooms that exist for you are DE and D9. "the world" doesn't exist: the world, quite literally, revolves around you.

it's just weird to think about, when the game world otherwise fits together 1:1. it feels like it should work like any other map. it just doesn't. and it's fun to pontificate about the deeper meanings of that.

(1. you would have to alter the room-neighbors table to make it work, which is kind of the crux of this issue: it's not a coordinate plane.)


zaratustra
@zaratustra

Neighbor-table space is common in parser interactive fiction - Colossal Cave used it for tricks such as one-way passages, , corridors that arrive at a room in a different direction they left the previous room from, and multiple directions leading to the same room.

An early notable use is in Atari Adventure, where mazes that only occupy five screens at most are turned into a tangled mess of corridors that's impossible to cleanly render in 2D space.


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in reply to @xkeeper's post:

The flip side is game worlds with hidden structure.

Link's Awakening has an overt overworld grid, but also an "indoors" grid which is consistently hidden from the player, unless they discover the teleport glitch, revealing a fascinatingly strange array of hidden pathways and connections that reflect the true consistency of the world.

yeah, though i'd argue that (in this case) it's the same as a game with an ordinary coordinate system. link's awakening lets you do this because your position isn't just what room link's in, it's what room he's in plus his physical location on the map grid.

link's awakening has two different map grids, even; the large ones (256, 16x16, ow + uw1 + uw2 + color dungeon) and then multiple smaller ones (64, 8x8, dungeons + some caves). depending on if the game thinks you're in an underworld or a submap specifically, the connections even change

link to the past has a similar "underworld" of sorts, there's maps that show it, and going out of bounds under the floors lets you walk around to any of them

i suppose a condensed way of describing it is that most systems involve a coordinate plane of existence versus only being direct connections in a void

huh. not quite the same thing -- in that this place exists, but isn't accessible -- but very similar vibes

mario rpg otherwise doesn't really sit on the same axis as the other comparisons; the map isn't designed to fit together, so there's no implied coordinate system.

I've always been weirly fascinated with how RuneScape handles mapping its world together, where "underground" rooms are just placed out north of the main world map, far enough that you can't see any other areas. Except of course for the rare instances where areas are just close enough that you can see entirely unrelated bits of overworld from a cave or whatever else.

surprisingly common. ragnarok online's maps, like the prontera indoors, are shared by pretty much every "indoor" space in that town, just with enforced client zoom levels to stop you from seeing the rest

another game i'm familiar with that does this is silent hill 1. there's a level viewer out there someone made in unity, and all of the spaces for a given "area" are on the same map. "old silent hill" is one area, with the cafe, intro area, some other scenes placed far enough into the "void" away from the map that you can't see it. it's not just for map placement, either, as if you use a walk-through-walls cheat you can go visit those places by walking through the void

these are cases where there aren't "unplaces" -- you can traverse the void, there's just nothing there. (but they are fascinating all on their own...)

RO also disables teleport skills and items indoors, to try and stop the illusion from breaking. This causes some other weird janky behavior that I can't remember off hand since it's been a while

i remember looking around the inside (as a gm, on a private server) trying to jump to some of the visible areas, but it seemed like they didn't even have walkable floors -- so disused they weren't even traversable.

in reply to @xkeeper's post:

in reply to @zaratustra's post:

the most notable part of this is that is exactly what i would have expected -- use of something like this to maybe make an "impossible" passage, or a crossover, or the like. but nope, it's laid out completely ordinary, with no japes

e: what's interesting is that MBJ is full of one-way paths, too -- most doorways are, even -- and yet all of the connections here are two-way