I've spend a few time on the map in the Chronicles Of Doryen. It's important because the world is huge and you need an easy way to know where to go. The map allows you to see your position in the world and find places of interest like cities. In fact, there is currently only cities, but I plan to add more specific places like trainers and your active quest's target. When you have selected a place in the map, an indicator will appear on the main game screen. Follow this indicator and you will reach the selected place.
Ok, this was the functional part. Now let's see the bells and whistles... There are two pretty cool features embedded in the map. The first is the zooming ability. You can zoom from an eagle eye view where each console cell represents 250 cells of the game view to a very low altitude view. In fact, you can currently zoom up to scale 1. The zoom is done in real-time and is powered by the image mipmapping features to be included in the upcoming 1.2 release of the doryen library...
You can see the zoom in action with this animated gif. It's far from being as impressive as the real thing but it helps you to get the picture.
The second feature is even more useless... But I find it awesome. In fact, the map does not behave like a paper map but rather like a plane view of the world. Thus, it gets the changing daylight (orientation and color). Ok, it makes no sense from the player character point of view, but I couldn't resist coding it...Again, an animated gif...
