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Your maps are the best. I can't wait for Lufia the Legend Returns to be finished. It is obvious you put a lot of time into your maps. I just wanted you to know that I appreciate it.

Quo Vadis

For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to KingKuros's Quo Vadis (C64) maps.

Quo Vadis finally gets its long-overdue recognition for Maps Of The Month, an honour somehow missed until now (though it did make it onto the "VGMaps's 15th Anniversary - 15 BEST MAP SETS!" video.  This large, single map also got published in Retro Gamer issue 81!  What's notable about this game, you ask?  Why, it was the biggest game at the time, the first to be over a thousand screens in size!

Its other claim to fame are the real riches someone could have earned.  Has anyone claimed the £40,000 in prizes for solving the riddle within this game?   It is now 400 months since its release, and as far as anyone can tell, it hasn't been paid out.  There are six clues within this game - five found in this labyrinth and a sixth as you exit.  Being the first to solve them and mailing in the correct answer should have won somebody £30,000 and a scepter worth £10,000, but that probably never happened.  But at least here, KingKuros finally gets something for scouring this entire cavern!  Okay, a Maps Of The Month recognition isn't the same as £40,000, but it's something.

So to recognize the effort put into mapping the first game to be over 1000 screens large. KingKuros's Quo Vadis (C64) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for January 2018.

Yes, actually Square Enix use baked environnement maps and not 3D full models.

I wouldn't be opposed to hosting 3D maps on VGMaps; would love it, actually, as VGMaps could then get closer to modern...

But is there a common/standard file format for 3D maps now?

Oh hey!

Not sure, the file is in .blend however.

Oh btw, UPDATE: it seems there's been a bit of complications regarding Academia. Errors and such. We are looking into it. :

I wouldn't be opposed to hosting 3D maps on VGMaps; would love it, actually, as VGMaps could then get closer to modern...

But is there a common/standard file format for 3D maps now?

Hello!

I am delighted to say that Iyenal of VG-Resource has ripped the first map for my ongoing project. As excited as I am to show you all the great work he's done we are still negotiating things and I can't wait to get the map up and running through here!

Here are the maps! With downloads.

Iyenal-

Final Fantasy XIII-2: Academia 400AF
Download (Coming very soon)
Sonic Forces: Stage 7- Arsenal Pyramid
Download (Coming January)
Overwatch: King's Row
Download (Coming February)

I am planning a monthly release of maps. After the above first three maps are released and if enough interest, I'll be posting a seperate website for all maps. This thread is just to test the waters.

Please let me know if a 3D map download website is of interest to you all.

BREAKING NEWS GUYS!

I got with a dude Iyenal on VGResource and he has successfully ripped the city of Academia in 400AF from Final Fantasy XIII-2!!

After a couple more maps ripped from various games I just want to gauge interest in a 3D VGMaps variant.

I'll be making a thread on Map Gab once I get the .blend file. So exciting! Downloads depend on getting permission from Iyenal of course.

Yes, this is VGMaps, not "VGAllGraphicalAssets".

Of course it's up to the mapper how to handle them if at all, but I wouldn't be opposed to including titles and cut scenes and anything else as long as they are neatly arranged and part of an image that is still mostly a map.  Like opening sequence shots with the map of the first stage/area, that kind of thing.  Though it could be considered spoileriffic to include end stuff with the last stage/area... hmmm.  In any case, just like the maps themselves, anything else added should all be kept as neat and simple as possible.

I only mapped the first couple areas of Totally Rad (NES), but I always felt that if I were to redo them or request that someone do them, that the cut scenes could be included in the maps, since the '80s/'90s surfer slang is amusing to me.  But as with any game I would be quite pleased with just the maps, as that is the point.

Can you add also the Intro, Cutscenes, Briefing to the Levels? And the different Titlescreens Ultra/Palcom. End Sequence too.

Even if nice to have I think things like these are out of scope for maps. I like to keep it simple so I try to avoid adding to much superfluous stuff.
Maybe I'll add some screenshots from cutscenes if they don't take up to much space. Sorry to disappoint you, but I hope you'll still like the maps.

Shovel Knight has been partially done by TerraEsperZ, no idea if they're still working on that

Unfortunately not. I've always mapped using screenshots and, whenever possible, emulators that could disable layers. Shovel Knight has many layers that can't be disabled so you're left with two choices: take a ton of screenshots and extrapolate what you can't see using the game's individual tiles (a gruelling task), or extract the layers straight from the game's code. I'm nowhere near smart enough to do the later, and trying the former took me several weeks to assemble the game's simplest maps.

As much as I love this game, I simply don't have the patience and energy to keep mapping it. Sorry .

The extrapolation is what I tend to do, but yeah, it's really not fun if you can't get lost in it, and when it's too many layers and the layers all share colours, it just gets frustrating.
Since you're not working on it, I'll keep an eye for it in giveaways and the like. Used up my vidya budget on Momodora, but I'm curious to try to map SK too.



@Nega: Ripping models from games isn't easy. Even ripping assets from classic games is hard (despite some emulators having tools for it!), which is why so many maps are made using screenshots. It's easier for some games than others, but there's no one-size-fits-all method, because different games use different methods for storing their assets. A tool developed for one game isn't likely to work for another game, even if the developers used the same game engine and the same 3D programs. In addition, it's a lot easier to make a case for sharing a finished map with the public compared to sharing raw assets, especially when it comes to modern games.
If you're looking to commission people to map these games for you, you should first sort the games into categories based on what types of assets they use, so that you can approach the right people for each game, and can have a general idea of the amount of work that would go into it. Mapping a game can take dozens, sometimes hundreds of hours, and you'll want to budget accordingly, and perhaps focus on the games that are easier/quicker to map.


2D pixel art games
- These are probably the easiest to map, even if no tools are available to disable parallax layers
- If tile-based, it's easier to reconstruct parts that can't be seen during normal play
- If the game has parallax effects, that makes it more difficult. If the different layers can't be disabled to allow them to be captured separately, it requires a LOT of screenshots to get the image data needed to look nice on the map, so be prepared to pay for many extra hours of work. If the game uses the same colours for the different layers, separating them from screenshots is even harder.
- If the game has dynamic lighting effects or colour overlays and no way to disable them, again, be prepared to either pay for a lot of extra screenshots and manual recolouring, or expect a map with choppy colours, especially of the lighting effects consist of gradients rather than sharp shapes.

2D non-pixel art games
- If the assets have aliasing (soft, non-pixelly edges), it's much harder to rip them from screenshots. This is not a problem if the assets are static relative to each other, but is an issue if there are parallax effects, as the assets will be overlapping different things in different screenshots, which will make them look slightly different in each one. The softer the edges, the worse they'll look.
- As with pixel art games, lighting effects pose a challenge for screenshot mapping. Manual recolouring is generally not an option with non-pixel art because the individual pixel colours aren't as predictable and there are way more pixels to work with. In those cases, one needs to either rip the assets from the game and rebuild the map from them, or one needs debug tools to disable the effects or fix them in place.
- These games tend to have high-res art, which means that to be reasonably-sized, the maps will likely be much smaller than what you'd see in-game. Plus, unless the mapper is using ripped assets, they'll be dependent on the resolution they ran the game in.

3D games
- If you want maps that represent the in-game visuals, you pretty much need access to a level editor where you can control the camera or some very good asset/level extraction tools. Even with such tools, 2D maps are only possible for games where the gameplay areas are either essentially 2D (e.g. Trine), or are flat enough that they can be separated into a series of flat "floors"; any game with a more complex use of the 3D space will generally not make for a good 2D image.
- If you want maps using in-game assets, it may help to sort your desired games by the engine they use. Some engines support reverse-engineering better than others.
- Most people just screenshot the in-game maps and annotate them, since the developers would have already gone through the trouble of figuring out how to make their 3D space work in 2D. If that's not a good option, drawing a map from scratch might be a possibility.

Another thought:
Sometimes, engine publishers will make parts of games or whole games available as project files (as opposed to compiled games ready to play), in order to promote their engine. YoYo Games did this with Spelunky and a few other games a while back. Tracking those down could be quite helpful to mappers. In general, finding resources and tools to help mappers with specific games is probably even more likely to get those games mapped than offering money. Money won't get a game mapped if the mapper doesn't have the tools to do it.



Since Bastion's on your list and I have it, I tried to see if I could rip its textures. Nope :| Couldn't get any of the tools to convert the XNB files to PNG files to work, they all crashed. Hopefully there's someone else out there with an interest in this game, someone who's more familiar with XNA, its files, and its tools. Bastion's maps are, as far as I can tell, made of tiles, so without a way to open the map data in addition to the getting the textures, I'd have to arrange the maps out of tiles by hand based on screenshots, and that's too tedious and time-consuming to be worth it.