Hi all, I've been playing through the Gold Box Games that I collected from various GOG collections, including the Forgotten Realms Collection. So far I've played through Pool of Radiance and Curse of Azure Bonds--both very fun games, I got to transfer my characters between them and had no complaints with GBC. Now I'm playing through the third game in the series, Secret of The Silver Blades, and once getting to the Ruins of Old Verdigris, the automapper went nuts! Instead of properly mapping the area to an 80x64 (I counted)grid of squares, scrolling between different portions of the map to make everything fit within a 16x16 view window, or zooming out to show more squares, it instead "squished" everything to make it fit inside one, single 16x16 window. The window has NOT been scaled up to show more on screen at once, again it still continues to be 16x16! And that means the dev used every trick in the book to get the maps to fit in this ridiculously artificially restricted space.

The "lossy compression" technique being used here, is accomplished by having the arrow that represents the party on the map, teleport from one place to another. Different areas of the same "shape" are overlaid on top of each other. And doing this means sometimes having N,S,E,W orientations reversed! Fortunately left and right continue to be properly mapped or navigation could be even more chaotic. And this behavior continues later in the game--in the mines where there are 8 levels of similar size for example. The result of all this is making the automapper all but totally useless. About the only thing you can use it for is to reference the "shapes" found on the maps of the official guides provided with the GOG version, from user submitted strategy guides online, or ones that have been drawn by hand.

So my question is, is this behavior the same for all games that contain maps over 16x16 in size? Or is it only for Secret of The Silver Blades? I consider this a major disappointment for what I would otherwise consider great companion software, and makes me hesitant to fire up the automap for later games using the Gold Box engine--there are 7 more.

The maps you see in GBC really are the maps that the game itself uses, as the engine is still limited to 16x16 maps. It's just that the game uses various tricks to create the illusion of the map being much bigger, including the use of teleporters to get as much mileage out of the 16x16 map size limitation of the engine. Then, to preserve the illusion, the standard in-game automap is disabled in these locations.

Your external program is shattering the illusion by displaying the automap in areas where it was clearly meant not to be displayed, and as a result you're seeing strange things like this.

Thank you for the response. And your explanation gives me some insight on how the Gold Box engine itself works, but not on why GBC's automapper is the way it is. For it to be a useful tool, it shouldn't matter how the game's engine is handling the data. GBC needs to reorganize it so it will be displayed in a way that is useful to the player. If not then what's the point? Are players firing up GBC simply to get an overview on how the software is engineered? I'd think a debugger would be far more useful for that. As it is, GBC is now being included with Steam purchases of Gold Box engine games. Valve's intended audience are gamers, not programmers. I really don't think they expect the majority of their customers to be using it to understand how the software works. They want the games to be more accessible so more people will want to buy and play these classics.

Anyway, as great of a tool GBC is, I consider this a major oversight on part of the developers. I hope they'll take steps to correct it, and make GBC one of the best software companions to a classic game series that's ever been created.

It is the way it is because that is what the map data looks like. The designers used event data in the form of teleporters to move the player around between many different maps, and GBC can’t know if a teleporter event is placed there as an actual in-world effect or as designer trick to make a map appear different than what the map data says.

You could perhaps add the ability to display a fake automap in certain, predefined areas where the map data isn’t good enough, based on what it is believed the designers envisioned the map to look like. (Such maps already exist)

But it likely is a massive workload and I doubt Valve is paying the author of GBC (Joonas Hirvonen, as far as I can tell) a single cent for his efforts.