Architecture:Map Module
There is no map module in v0.4 at present. What is described below refers to the v0.3 map engine, but chances are that a new implementation will work in similar ways.
Maps and Views
One prominent component of the engine is the renderer. It produces the graphical representation of a scene, and that about 40 times per second. (A new scene – or internal engine state – is computed about 75 times per second, btw.)
More important than those numbers or the fact that drawing and update operations are disjunct is the implementation. As the heading suggests, a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture is used.
The part of the map being displayed is determined by so-called mapviews. A mapview can be of any size and can direct output to any surface. Multiple mapviews can be active at the same time, although at present they can’t show different maps, just different areas of the same map.
The question that remains is how a mapview knows what part of a map to display. For that purpose, each mapview may have a schedule script assigned (the controller), which is executed before rendering takes place. The script in turn can use the methods provided by the mapview class for all kinds of effects. Usually, it will want to center the view on a certain character, but it is not limited to this.