Automap
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Automap is an abbreviation for "automatic map", a navigational aid featured in many video games and computer games. The automap is a small, abstract, top-down map of nearby areas of the game world, centered on the player's character, and updated in real time as the character moves around. This functionality is identical to the real world's GPS-based automotive navigation system, except that a video game's automap typically fills in "black", unexplored areas of the map as the player explores it.
Automaps usually display traversable terrain, allies, enemies, and important locations or items. In most games, the automap begins as a solid field of black, and the map is automatically drawn as the player discovers new areas of the game world. Some team-oriented multi-player games, such as Age of Empires II or Empire Earth, allow players to draw temporary lines, signals or markings on the automap for others to see. Things in a fog of war portion of an automap may not be updated until they are rediscovered.
Automapping was a particularly desirable feature in computer role-playing games, which typically featured a dungeon with many levels for players to explore. Before automapping, players were expected to draw maps by hand as they played the game, so they could navigate through the dungeon levels later (game boxes for early 1980s Wizardrys, for example, included graph paper).
The first automap in an RPG was probably in the 1988 Apple II game Bard's Tale III. In the 1993 first-person shooter game Doom, possibly the game that popularized the term automap, the "Automap" is an item the player can pick up, which divulges the entire map of the current level, with red walls indicating places already seen and gray walls indicating places which the player has yet to explore. The 2006 release Oblivion, a more recent example, includes an automap with quest markers, notes, and the ability to "fast travel" to any known point on the world map.
