Tutorials - Tells and Hints

The following is a collection of miscellaneous tips to aid with mapping.

1. Look for repeating patterns on walls or floors; try to identify the base unit in that repetition. If it repeats frequently and/or over a large area, you can use that as your unit of measure, rather than character paces, which are difficult to use because of bad camera angles and the fact that the character might not stop walking even when he/she has ceased to travel.
2. Look for objects that you can position; moving these items around will give you points to derive LOPs from, and larger items can give you another scaling unit. Cones, for example, provide a lot of functionality in both arenas - they have a square base, which can be used as a unit of scale, and they taper to a near-point at the top, which makes them good for LOPs. If you're brave enough to try the nearly-famous UruTweaker application, you can turn on/off a lot of other objects that can be used in either manner.
3. For each of the above items, don't worry if your scale is different even in two different areas of the same map; you can always resize the areas to scale correctly in a graphics application prior to publication. Or, you can publish each sub-area as a physically separate page in a mini-atlas.
4. When possible, use more than one method of fixing the position of an object; you can use LOPs, pacing, and object scales to increase the accuracy of your fix.
5. Circles and the number 5. We see a lot of very large circles in D'ni architecture, and we all have compasses, right? These circles are almost always decorated with patterns based on the number 5. For example, the Nexus Room floor has a pattern with 10 spokes extending to the outer rim of the circle. 360 degrees divided by 10 is 36, by 5 is 72. If you can place the origin of your drawn map at the center of the circle, you can use this pre-rendered protracter to find LOPs to objects in the area.
6. Elevations are tricky, but you can frequently find things in Uru which allow fairly accurate height scaling. Boxes, crates, cones, barriers - they are ALWAYS the same height as the last time you saw them. In addition, if you use a lubberline background, you can use trigonometry to find the height of an object (there will be a tutorial in this concept).
7. Ki positioning; hopefully, Ki communicators will make a return appearance in the imminent expansion pack release. This will afford the use of Markers and a coordinate system based on Rezeero (the Great Zero). If they show up, they will make mapping all the simpler. Something to note, though, is that the altitude may be skewed by the height of your wrist. Remember that the Ki has no concept of the floor, or of the "center" of your avatar (unless they were programmed that way - I reserve the right to be wrong on this point).