2nd December 2004, 12:35 AM
It all depends on the implementation, DJ. In some games that is true in others it is not. For radar, it's simple: radar is a circle (usually) on the screen that shows the locations of all the enemies around you, and sometimes friends as well. But automaps are different. There are many different kinds -- onscreen automaps that go in the middle of the screen (over the playfield) and show a 2d top-down view of the ground as you explore it, turning and following you as you wander around so that you can easily navigate the terrain if you have been there before but obscuring your view (like in Diablo II or Jedi Knight I), pause-screen automaps that have full 3d representations of the world (like in TIE Fighter or Jedi Knight I, where you can look at the whole area (well, for JK, the whole area that you have explored) on the pause screen map and rotate around in it in 3d (shaded semi-transparent polys)), onscreen automaps that are like radar in that they are a circle in the corner of the screen and are devoted to the automap but they have not just enemy locations but the terrain as well (so you can see both the local surroundings and people or points of note, like in Tribes: Vengeance, Guild Wars, World of Warcraft, etc) (these automaps show you all of the terrain and everything in the nearby area. Usually this means you can see locations for everything on the circle of the automap... and also these are often tied to a larger map, where you can see the bigger picture (like the world map in WoW) as opposed to just the little circle on screen). The final kind of automap I can think of would be that 2d map display you can bring up -- a different category from the 3d ones because it is generally simpler and easier to use, but possibly less informative and helpful depending on the game...
So while you have something of a point for a Jedi Knight implementation of an automap, look at a World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, or TIE Fighter (for the radar aspect) to see where the cracks appear in your arguement.
That is to say, I consider them very similar. I do prefer automaps because I like to be able to see the terrain, but radar is better than nothing (and for a space sim like TIE Fighter they would be indestinguishable because there is no land so how can you tell if it's radar or an automap... :))
So while you have something of a point for a Jedi Knight implementation of an automap, look at a World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, or TIE Fighter (for the radar aspect) to see where the cracks appear in your arguement.
That is to say, I consider them very similar. I do prefer automaps because I like to be able to see the terrain, but radar is better than nothing (and for a space sim like TIE Fighter they would be indestinguishable because there is no land so how can you tell if it's radar or an automap... :))