BRICK · public · first seen
The map is now something you can actually use
Zoom and pan
Scroll to zoom, drag to pan, from the whole island in to 9x. The point under your cursor stays put while you zoom, which is what makes it feel like a map rather than a slider. There are buttons too — ZOOM ±, CENTRE ON ME, and WHOLE ISLAND — and the current zoom is shown in the corner.
The thing that quietly breaks features like this is the click-to-world conversion. The map is stretched to fit your window, so a careless version puts every click in the wrong place the moment the window is not exactly the canvas size. That round trip is tested at four different zoom and pan combinations with the map deliberately squashed to half size — worst error is zero.
Custom waypoints
Press ADD WAYPOINT and click the map. Each one gets its own colour and a name you can type over. Right-click a waypoint on the map to delete it. Up to twelve, and they are saved with your game.
The one you are tracking follows you out of the map screen and shows up in three places while you play:
in the world, as a beam of light you can walk toward
on the minimap — and when it is off the edge it sticks to the rim and keeps pointing the way instead of just disappearing
on your HUD, as a direction arrow, the name, and the distance
Get within 6 metres and it tells you that you have arrived and stops tracking, rather than nagging at you from three metres away. Placing a waypoint starts tracking it straight away, because you almost always place one meaning to walk there.
The legend, and three real icons
The old legend was a single line of text naming eight icons. There are sixteen on the map, and it said nothing at all about the coloured dots or the shaded circles.
It is now a proper panel beside the map, grouped into Places, Worth A Look, People, Yours, and Ground — so it explains not just the letters but what a blue dot is, what the dashed red ring means, and which shading is a safe zone.
The airdrop, the warehouse and the downed helicopter are now drawn icons rather than letters: a crate under a parachute, a shed with a roller door, and a helicopter on its nose with its rotor snapped and flames coming off it. They are drawn as shapes rather than picture files, so they stay sharp at every zoom and add nothing to the download size.
The helicopter took four attempts. Rendering it and looking at it — rather than reasoning about it — is what caught each problem: it was invisible on a dark background, then the rotor ran through the middle of the body, then the tail and rotor crossed into an X with a canopy so big it read as an eye. The version that shipped is a proper side view, tipped onto its nose and burning.
A side effect worth knowing: the letter clashes are gone. A used to mean both Arcade and Airdrop, and W both Warehouse and wreck. Now A is only the Arcade and W only the Warehouse. The minimap is far too small for drawings, so it still uses letters there — the airdrop is a down-arrow and the wreck is H.
Keeping the legend honest
The legend is generated from one list, and there is a test that walks every marker the game actually puts on the map and fails if the legend does not explain it — keyed on the drawn icon, not just the letter behind it. I also checked that the test can actually fail, by inventing a landmark the legend had never heard of and confirming it got caught. A test that cannot fail is not worth having.
Also
At full zoom-out the city used to be a small square with every icon, ward name and dot stacked on top of each other. Ward areas now scale with the world and names only appear when there is room to read them, so the island view is legible.