Mod idea - Fog of War for the world map

[quetzilla]

My idea is this:

 

1) Hide the starting map markers for everywhere except the sewer exit.

2) Pull some UI manipulation tricks to literally hide each worldmap cell until you explore it. I'm just starting with the construction set, but I do have some programming skills and my idea for how to do it would be this: Create a grey circular graphic with blended transparent edges and apply it to the worldmap for every cell that hasn't been visited. When you visit a cell it will turn the grey circle for that cell off, uncovering the map as you go along. Of course you modding geniuses might have another way to do it.

 

Anyway, the idea is to increase the 'almighty immersion factor' by actually making you run around and explore stuff by looking at it rather than hitting f4 all the time to look at the worldmap and fast travel.

[Vagrant0]

My idea is this:

 

1) Hide the starting map markers for everywhere except the sewer exit.

2) Pull some UI manipulation tricks to literally hide each worldmap cell until you explore it. I'm just starting with the construction set, but I do have some programming skills and my idea for how to do it would be this: Create a grey circular graphic with blended transparent edges and apply it to the worldmap for every cell that hasn't been visited. When you visit a cell it will turn the grey circle for that cell off, uncovering the map as you go along. Of course you modding geniuses might have another way to do it.

 

Anyway, the idea is to increase the 'almighty immersion factor' by actually making you run around and explore stuff by looking at it rather than hitting f4 all the time to look at the worldmap and fast travel.

The first is fairly easy, just have them disabled until found.

 

The second however isn't possible. UI modifications wouldn't allow any sort of overlay over the map, and no amount of ingame scriupting or detection would be able to control that overlay. The closest you could get would be just replacing the world map with an image of blank paper, and just having the landmarks provide the only idea (aside from local maps) about where things are. Really though, it doesn't make much practical sense. Unlike Morrowind, most of Cyrodil is inhabited and charted terratory, it isn't too unreasonable to believe that people wouldn't walk around with a good idea of locations, or at the least, that a map couldn't be easily obtained. The problem being again, there is no way to obscure the map, or even change what graphic is linked. So even if you tied it to an ingame item, there would be no way to enable/disable the map depending on if you had that item or not.