I brought this topic up in the distant past, but wanted to get some fresh input on it since it's been so long.
With tools like the EQ Zone Viewer available, it is trivial to create overhead maps that are an actual in-game representation of the zone.
The only part that's broken right now is the scaling/viewing of bitmapped images in ShowEQ.
For instance, go into the ShowEQ source code, and look for the piece that loads background images. You can load .jpgs if you want, just change the extension. Support is built into QT. Just copy your jpg file to the maps directory in ShowEQ and name it the same as the map, just with the .jpg extension instead of .map.
When you first load it up you're like, "SWEET!" but then when you try to zoom in it gets all fucked up. it doesn't zoom right, and my guess would be because the actual zone size and the jpg size aren't the same... what we need is some kind of mechanism to match the zone size up to the jpg (or png or whatever the fuck you want) size so it zooms correctly.
I'm not a programmer. I can do Perl and shell scripting and I can read C/C++, but I do not code for a living nor do I code often. I can figure out how to make changes, but to create new code is usually beyond my ken.
If anyone would like to take this idea and run with it, I think ShowEQ could benefit greatly (visually) from the ability to display graphical maps instead of lines. This would also eliminate the need to convert maps or draw them.
Or, you could skip the middle man and create an automatic map converter from the EQ zone files. ShowDAOC or Excalibur or whatever it was did exactly that; converted maps directly from the zone files.
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