Or How to Make a Game Map for Fallout
	Each area of Fallout has one or more game maps associated with it. These are initially designed by the designer of that location. We use Canvas, an object orientated drawing program - great for making straight lines, or traditional graph paper, which is great for making not-so-straight lines. The walls, and other basic parts of the map, such as doors or special objects, are laid out. Each area is labelled, this is to help the scripter find every location in the design document on the actual map. On average, each location has around 3-4 maps. Some maps have elevations (like an underground or tower). There are also 4 different types of random location maps (desert, city, mountain and coastland), with 2-3 different maps per location type. This is a printout of the Raiders map design. Notice that it is not very detailed. The detail comes later. The in-house development editor is called Mapper. This is the program that allows us to create maps, lay down the various graphics, and then attach scripts to the various objects (like critters or doors). It will not be released to the public. The first step for the map creator is to lay the basic floor tiles. These are the graphics that will form the floor. They can be dirt, rocks, water, or the floor of a building. There are hundreds of different floor tiles, with some specialized pieces for transitions between the various types of tiles. Laying some floor tiles down using Mapper. Think of it as a game of building blocks. First you lay down the floor, then the walls, then the roof. In between, you will put in all the detail pieces -- like stoves, desks, chairs and people. The amount of detail is limited by the amount of original, unique graphics we have. You don't want to place too many of one type of object (like a particular desk), since the map will then look like a bunch of the same objects (like a room of clones). Yet, if you have too many unique objects -- they have to be read off of the disc, and they all have to be loaded into memory at the same time. This requires more memory and slows down the loading of the maps. Lots of work goes into each area to make it good looking and quick to load. Each game map can contain up to three elevations, even though only one elevation can be displayed at a time. This allows us to put sewers or towers on a building, and keep it consistent with the other parts of the game map. This also means we don't have to load maps off of the disc quite as often, we can keep them in memory -- speeding up gameplay. Wall tiles. Pretty bare so far. Scenery objects. Mapper also allows us to: place objects within other objects, like a gun on a gangmember. put down invisible objects to block the scrolling of the screen, or transport the player back the town map. change the inventory or statistics of creatures on the screen. test the current game map within a partial game engine, drastically decreasing the time it takes to create an area. set the starting location for the player. change attributes of objects, like visibility, and light intensity. move objects from one location to another. change the elevation within a map. and more... Critters and items. Now we can see some detail. Roofs. They are very similar to floor tiles in operation.
	The final Raiders map, scaled to about 18% of normal size. The actual map is many screens in size. And this is a really small map. Most maps are much larger in size.
	From start to finish, this process may take weeks to complete all the game maps in a given area. There are about 50 or so maps, divided across 15 areas and the random locations. Once all the graphics have been laid down in a map, the scripters take control and start attaching and testing their scripts. This is an ongoing process that will continue up until the very day we silver, or send a disc off to the manufacturing plant.