So, How Big Is The World In Paul Barnett’s Wall Map?
Paul Barnett posted a somewhat cryptic tweet yesterday, commenting on the size of a map of a game world that had just been hung at BioWare Mythic.
Put up a 7 foot by 7 foot map at work, it looks awesome! It’s half the size it is in game scale! Great to see the whole world as one image.
— thatbarnettbloke (@thatbarnettblok) April 7, 2011
Now, the following is purely speculative, but if we assume that he’s talking about the world map for the much-rumoured Ultima project, we can make a few inferences about the size of its game world.
First, though, let’s pull up the Ultima 6 world map for reference. The Ultima 6 overland (Britannia) measures 16,384 pixels by 16,384 pixels.
Now, there are three common printing resolutions that I can think of: 72 DPI, 300 DPI…and 150 DPI, which was a pretty common large-format print resolution that I saw used a fair bit back when I worked for this company.
Also, for the purposes of these calculations, I’m also assuming that Barnett made a common grammatical and mathematical error in his tweet, and actually meant that the “real” size of the game map is 14 feet by 14 feet.
If we assume a print resolution of 72 DPI, the Ultima 6 game map measures 18.963 feet on a side. At 150 DPI, it measures 9.102 feet on a side. And at 300 DPI, it measures 4.551 feet on a side.
So if we assume that Barnett’s wall map is printed at 72 DPI, his game world is approximately 0.545 times the size of Ultima 6’s game world, if we actually take the square (that is: area) into consideration.
(Showing my work: 16,384 pixels/72 pixels per inch = 227.556 inches = 18.963 feet. 14 feet/18.963 feet = 0.738, which squares to 0.545.)
If we assume his wall map is printed at 300 DPI, his game world is approximately nine times the size of Ultima 6’s game world.
And if we assume 150 DPI (which I think might actually be the case), his game world is approximately 2.36 times the size of Ultima 6’s game world. Which, really, is actually quite a large world indeed. And if this does pertain to the rumoured Ultima project, and if in fact Mythic have managed to implement an open world version of Britannia that’s got 2.36 times the area of Ultima 6’s Britannia…well…that could be pretty darn cool.