Archgrove - Implicit Definition

Just to clear up some misconceptions, the point of this article is not to recreate the plugin, or repair it for the modern Asheron’s Call. The plan is to write a set of articles on how it was created, and why it (in general) worked. Those looking for a replacement would do well to visit http://www.flynn1179.me.uk/ac/?minimap and see the impressive looking work that Thorfinn Sigurdssen has been doing (Disclaimer: I have neither personally tested this, nor been contacted by the author).

Last time, we left off having made a series of educated guesses about how the dungeon system in AC works. From our observations, we’ve noted that every dungeon seems to be laid out in a giant 3d grid of cubes – assembled as if from lego bricks, prefabricated elements of dungeon.

We can see the prototypical dungeon template above – each little cube is ready to be filled with a one of a choice of dungeon blocks by an eager designer. A template block might look as follows.

This one is taken from my Asherons’s Call 2 archives (so don’t go looking for it in game), but it illustrates the point. The player walks around on the interior (the complex looking set of triangles), and the rest of the cube is filled with virtual nothingness – in this fashion, we can make our big cubes look like caves, temples, whatever is needed (rather than a boring apartment block).

We could take four of the above dungeon elements (that we call dungeon cells), rotate them around and put them into adjoining cubes in the template to create a donut dungeon – a giant loop. Obviously, it’s up to the designer to ensure that there’s no corridor or tunnel that leads into an unfilled cube (and hence into the void).

This is all well and good, but now that we’ve made a plausible (and in this case, rather educated) guess at the dungeon structure, how does it help us? Our task is to draw a map of the walls of the dungeon, not big wireframe meshes stuck around the place! So, tune in next time to see a little bit of simple mathematics that will transform the above into something more useful for our purposes.