Scoresheet 2.0 Map (Patreon)

A number of roguelike morgue files include a little summary map of player surroundings at the time of death (or victory!). Although in text format it can never offer the same level of condensed detail as a screenshot or interactive map, even just a grid of characters can give a general idea of where Cogmind was and what was happening at the time.

One of the big limitations of exporting a text map is that it can't show Cogmind's machines properly. These are drawn with CP437 (extended ASCII), but we want the entire scoresheet to be widely compatible and not require any special encoding, which means we have to stick to pure ASCII.

Here's an example of what happens when character encoding can't be interpreted correctly (and we don't want that!):

Well in a lot of cases the type of machine is not terribly important, so I decided to draw all of them using a character not used elsewhere: the double quote. Interactive machines are certainly important, so their interactive piece is still represented by the appropriate capital letter, making it possible to distinguish that particular machine block from the rest.

This is looking better:

There I've also added a border around the map view, which comes in handy near map borders, or when the known map doesn't fill the available area. I left empty buffer columns to the left and right of the map, but not the top and bottom; this is because as a text file it will generally be viewed using a non-square/tall font, so the spacing looks more even this way.

You'll also notice that debris is completely removed (anything that would just be noise and interfere with interpreting the map shouldn't be there, especially since there's no cellwise brightness we can use to emphasize/de-emphasize various elements). This was actually kinda hard to do for previously seen areas and required a bit of a hack to retroactively "erase" debris ASCII without misinterpreting actual item knowledge.

At this point I started testing out various different map styles. Do we want to be able to distinguish between FOV and non-FOV areas? How should unexplored areas be represented? I did tests of each to compare...

I think the last one is probably best.

I worked out some kinks in the content and did some more tests. If you've played Beta 8, you'll probably recognize this place :)

Here's what the caves look like:

I went back and added a way to see the edges of the map (as with the advanced.cfg showMapBorders setting):

But then realized that feature is pointless if going with a style that marks unknown cells, which reveals the map border naturally xD

So I think the final style is what we'll go with for Scoresheet 2.0 :D