Very simple concept, murder implementation ( I'd hate to code it, that's for sure). This is in the " using books as an RPG imersion tool" category, which has been mentioned somewhere, though it would be just cool on its own.
You'd use books to store maps of areas, as they were when you recorded the map. Some kind of algorithm that makes PNGs from map data by, say, 1 pixel per block, top-down projection to first block of the surface, with some clever method of color-coding to make it look like a fantasy map. I say this like it is easy, I know it is not. It is usually the mundane-sounding things like this that layway the game I'm working on.
Materials/Tools:
You need a special tool: the tripod. Made like so:
[] [] []
Or there abouts. You also need three sheets of paper.
How do you use it? Well, you go to a location that is some minimum distance above the surrounding landscape, and place the tripod. You then right click a sheet of paper onto the tripod. The paper disappears, but when you take the tripod down, it has a sheet of paper behind its icon; you have surveyed and saved 1/3 or your map. You do this twice more, and a sheet is added to the icon each time. The max distance between surveying points is the maximum distance you can conceivably see (ignoring fog distance).
The third time, a map item pops out. The area it depicts is the rectangle that contains the triangle created by the points you surveyed, perhaps spread over multiple pages. You can bind maps (say, 3) into a book. Ideally you could label things, but that is a (complicated) topic for a different suggestion.
Also, why not have maps placeable as wall decorations like art?
Alternate process: you add as many sheets as you want to the tripod, with a max of 16. This number is indicated with a vertical "completion" bar on the side of the tripod icon. At anytime past 3 sheets (completion bar turns green at that point), you can go to the crafting table and put the tripod in, alone, and it will produce 1 map of everything you surveyed with that tripod (the tripod is not used up). You can then bind up to three maps into a single volume. Each sheet counts towards 1 page of map, or 1 tile on a wall-hanging (so the maximum map on a wall would be like 4x4 or 2x8, sufficiently epic for a study). That makes a map book contain a max of 48 pages of map.
You'd use books to store maps of areas, as they were when you recorded the map. Some kind of algorithm that makes PNGs from map data by, say, 1 pixel per block, top-down projection to first block of the surface, with some clever method of color-coding to make it look like a fantasy map. I say this like it is easy, I know it is not. It is usually the mundane-sounding things like this that layway the game I'm working on.
Materials/Tools:
You need a special tool: the tripod. Made like so:
[]
Or there abouts. You also need three sheets of paper.
How do you use it? Well, you go to a location that is some minimum distance above the surrounding landscape, and place the tripod. You then right click a sheet of paper onto the tripod. The paper disappears, but when you take the tripod down, it has a sheet of paper behind its icon; you have surveyed and saved 1/3 or your map. You do this twice more, and a sheet is added to the icon each time. The max distance between surveying points is the maximum distance you can conceivably see (ignoring fog distance).
The third time, a map item pops out. The area it depicts is the rectangle that contains the triangle created by the points you surveyed, perhaps spread over multiple pages. You can bind maps (say, 3) into a book. Ideally you could label things, but that is a (complicated) topic for a different suggestion.
Also, why not have maps placeable as wall decorations like art?
Alternate process: you add as many sheets as you want to the tripod, with a max of 16. This number is indicated with a vertical "completion" bar on the side of the tripod icon. At anytime past 3 sheets (completion bar turns green at that point), you can go to the crafting table and put the tripod in, alone, and it will produce 1 map of everything you surveyed with that tripod (the tripod is not used up). You can then bind up to three maps into a single volume. Each sheet counts towards 1 page of map, or 1 tile on a wall-hanging (so the maximum map on a wall would be like 4x4 or 2x8, sufficiently epic for a study). That makes a map book contain a max of 48 pages of map.