VGMaps.com now has over 50,000 maps!

[Cyartog959]

I have but one query that didn't get answered yet, even though we have 50,000 maps in VGMaps thus far...

Which map from what game got labelled as the 25,000th map in VGMaps history?

With all the excitement, I almost let that one slip from my mind.

[JonLeung]

I don't recall tracking that, so if it was never discussed at the time, then it was never counted.

I still have my folder of when we got to 50,000 maps exactly, so sorting them by "Date Modified", I looked for the 25,000th one, but before I get to that, there's at least a couple problems with that.

(1) The biggest one is that maps are remade now and then.  A mapper might find an error, or even entirely redo a map.  There are a few cases when I do deem a map replaceable with one from another mapper (thankfully that isn't too often, as I hate tough calls).  So any maps made before the 25,000 mark but remade/replaced after we passed it would mean that what looks like the 25,000th is actually a later one, and whatever is the true 25,000th must be an earlier one, but I'd have no idea which, because it's not like I was counting how many times maps have been replaced.

(2) Because I use PNGGauntlet to compress the maps (since they're usually .PNG files), but I sometimes have to run it multiple times to ensure the filesize is as small as it can be, I have a habit of using FMS File Date Changer to change the time to midnight that day when I rerun PNGGauntlet.  The idea is that if the date changes, then it compressed again, but if it hasn't, then it's reached its final size.  This process is so that I don't waste time trying to recompress files that have already been compressed as much as they can be.  Once I'm satisfied that they're all compressed, I change the dates of all of them to midnight again to indicate that their sizes are finalized.  That means all maps submitted and (usually) published within a day all have the same timestamp, and it would have affected both the "Date Modified" and the "Date Created" fields of the file details.

Anyway, like I said, I looked at the 25,000th file in the folder, and we got our 24,997th map on December 21, 2014.  That is, if we are ignoring (1).  So the 25,000th map would be the third one after that, right?

The thing is, I have 447 maps with a timestamp of midnight on December 22, 2014.  That's an insane number of maps for one day.

But when I look into it - and you can see for yourself on the News Archives if you scroll down on the "NEWS" on the front page, if you click on 2014 - there wasn't an update on December 22, 2014.

Looking at the 447 maps again, I notice many of them are by KeyBlade999, and then now I remember being BOMBARDED by a whole slew of his maps.  It happens from time to time when a longtime mapper (perhaps for GameFAQs, or for their own interest) learns of VGMaps, and/or suddenly decides to contribute a whole mass of maps all at once.

Because it was around Christmas, I probably wasn't able to get all of the maps up in one day, and indeed, I see that many of these maps were put up later than Dec. 22, 2014, even going into January 2015.

This actually helps, because I was going to say, the third map out of 447 would be impossible to pinpoint.  But since they weren't all published right away, you'd think it should be easier.

It looks like the third map should be from one of Ax Battler: A Legend Of Golden Axe, Shadow Force, or Amazon: Guardians Of Eden, since those were the first games whose maps were published after Dec. 21, specifically Dec. 26.  Amazon's maps technically have a date of Dec. 21, but 11:59 PM - usually my own indication that I wasn't able to compress it, but that it still was received on Dec. 22 (but then maybe that throws off the count by another four?), Shadow Force's maps have a date of Dec. 24 and Ax Battler's maps have a date of Dec. 26, meaning that they jumped ahead of the queue, maybe because I figured I would tackle KeyBlade999's huge mass of maps later, after getting Richard V. Grant's, Will Mallia's, and George s's maps out of the way first.

I'm usually good about putting maps up the same day, or at least putting them up in the order that I received them, so that brings us to...

(3) Apparently when it MIGHT have been - if we ignore (1) altogether) - I was apparently handling a ton of maps at once, so it was one of the rare times when I couldn't put them up in order of when I received them, and with so many games it would have been totally arbitrary which I would have put up.

All that to say... we really don't know.  Judging by that there would have been a good number of remakes of maps already, I can say it almost surely happened in 2014, but that's about it.

(And yeah, this turned out to take longer to write out than I thought, because I was investigating various things while writing this up...)