Topic: Rendering maps
For a while now I've been using maps on various locations on sequer.nl (artifacting, spawns, the killboard now), but my collection of maps is barely complete, tediously stitching together screenshots with Photoshop's difference layer blending, and don't even get started on passable terrain (that would require stitching together another 3 maps, then somehow filtering the passable terrain out of it to a seperate layer - technically possible but really not feasible).
I talked this over with Mark Zima (developer of Perpetuum Planner), and he updated his tools recently to export the contents of layers.gbf - the file that gets bigger when you start walking past gamma terraforming. After that there wasn't much to it; all of the islands heightmaps can be found in that file, which allowed me to try to render the in-game maps without the game fully automated - so I could retain my sanity and have all the maps consistently and with all additional layers.
DEV Gargaj was nice enough to do a devblog on this very subject a while back) (more blogs like this would be nice btw), so after some maths I managed to get nice sharp maps with almost perfectly accurate colors and passable terrain. Some other file had seperate info on buildings and such, so I composited that info on all base images right away (no robot can ever go through those anyway).
You can see some of the seperate layers and a final map here:
http://imgur.com/a/QtIRJ/layout/blog
tldr; I made new maps for my tools, they're not exactly like those in-game, but they look crisp and should be perfectly usable. I made the following updates:
https://sequer.nl/artifact-hunter/
The artifact hunter now has all islands, complete with passable terrain layers on all 3 slopes (light, assault, mech+).
http://killboard.sequer.nl/index.php?a= … zone_id=11
I had the heatmaps render server-side, now it's a Google Maps thingie with the same tiles from the artifact hunter, but with the built-in heatmap visualization layer. You can select other islands from any killmail (just click the island's name). Also has the passable terrain layers, as a plus.
With some shadow under the buildings layer, the isometric view on killmails of the battlefield seems to be improved now too. I might build on that so you can zoom and pan that view.
Obviously the spawn map now uses the new tiles, not much done there yet though. If you're interested in helping out (it's mostly about going through all spawns on one specific coordinate, so we can map everything there), drop me a line or something.
This was a fun project, thanks to everyone for their input