Client-side map!

First, I apologise as this has probably been brought up before, however I do not think this thread will do harm. I'll be honest, I didn't try to search for it, but only because I have such a bad experience with searching. It never brings up relevant results.

Anyway.

The game is almost completely server-side. Obviously this is the only option for MMOs, but not everything has to be like that.
The biggest mistake is making the map completely server-side. If it was client-side, and done right, it would allow smooth scrolling, zooming, and (I think) much less traffic for the server. It could be done like this:

At first, the server sends the entire map to the client. This shouldn't even be that big, as when you think about it, shouldn't be much more than a regular 600x600 image. It only needs to store a 600x600 grid with 8(?*) different tile types, and only some of them hold extra information (level, owner, name, etc). So this part shouldn't be too hard.
* Empty space, main city, non-main city, stone oasis, crop oasis, iron oasis, wood oasis, fortified point. Anything else I might have missed?

If this does become a big file, then use compression, and when the player opens the map later, only send the updated tiles. A simple checksum could be used to verify if the maps match, to make sure the player won't use a wrong map forever. However this is not necessary if sending the entire map does not take a lot.

Anyway, after the client has the map, it can do everything it did before much more smoothly, without annoying loading times. Also, zooming out could be made possible, down to 1 pixel = 1 tile (with color coding of course). The usual pinching, sliding, etc manouvers could be used for smooth and easy use of the world map, just like they're used in Safari, for example. Sliding could be done in any direction, not just straight up, straight left, straight down, straight right. The server doesn't even have to do a thing about this any more, until the next time the map is opened, where it has to make sure it's up to date. Searching can also be done client-side, as well as going to a specific coordinate of course. Everything will suddenly become so simple.


Actually I can't think of anything else that needs to become client-side. But this is a really important feature in my opinion.

lol i love that idea. when i scroll, sometimes an error message pops up and its really anoying.

too long, i didnt read it, and i didn't understand it.
nothing against the idea, though can someone put it in a 14-year-old's words?

Sorry, didn't realise how big it turned out! XD

Basically, it means the map will be like 50 times smoother.
The main reason it's so big is to explain how to make it smoother

i would really enjoy a better map.

I'd love to be able to visit the map in my web browser on my laptop - much more space to see stuff. It takes ages to browse the map on an iphone.

Although I imagine hk won't implement this because they apparently charge for people generating an alliance map (wtf?). I know games like Travian made map data publicly available and people did all kinds of cool mashups that really enhanced the gameplay. For example, there were tools that allow mapping of multiple alliances for better coordination of alliance wars.

[Sameh]

Because the haypi team love their money, and will charge you for it because they know people will actually pay for that crap.

Alliance maps are kind of a forbidden thing in high ranked alliances because people tends to leak them to other alliances or moles will buy them before declaring war on said alliance. I don't agree with alliance map in general it's very annoying to have to move every time there's a leak in the alliance

The reason mmo's make their games server-sided is that it's harder to hack. If Haypi made the map client-sided it would be all too easy to start hacking for people who have knowledge of values, how to change these values, and whatnot.
I do want a smoother map, but making it client-sided would not be the best way to fix this problem.