Imagine a huge world, where the player has to navigate through and find/select certain places. It includes different cities and in each city many different places. What I want the player to be able to, is to select one of them. How would you design the interface to help the player find a certain place most easily? What I have come up with is: a zoom-able map, the main viewport. On the right there is a small minimap that shows where on the whole world area the currently visible main viewport is located. The player can also move the map around with navigation buttons (or by dragging in the main viewport) and explore it that way, if he likes. On the lower left is a list, whichs content depends on the zoom level currently set. If the map is zoomed out, there the list contains cities the player can click on, to have the viewport jump to this city. On closer zoom levels the list represents the places that are currently visible in the viewport and a click on it selects the place. There''s also the possibility to click on the place on the map to select it. Just moving the mouse over a point pops up a tooltip with the place''s name (and maybe some additional information). So, can you think of anything to make the process of finding a special place any easier? I thought about a search function, but this may complicate the whole map too much, and players might not know the exact name of the place they are looking for (or there may be two similar named places in different cities). Any thoughts are welcome! ------------------------------ There are only 10 kinds of people: those that understand binary and those that don''t.

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Original post by grbrg It includes different cities and in each city many different places. What I want the player to be able to, is to select one of them.

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So you want the player to be able to select a sublocation within a larger location? Instead of "New York", you want him to be able to punch up "Brooklyn" or "Ellis Island" or maybe "Tiffany''s & Co." right?

Build it like an electronic atlas. First you click the continent, then the country, then the region, then the city, then the district, then the destination. Maybe a search feature in case you''ve forgotten where "Gorky Park" is, and a "recent places" list for the jet set crowd.

What''s the application? Will you be going places on business? Tracking down Carmen Sandiego? Wandering aimlessly a la Fallout (not a bad system there, if that''s the sort of thing you''re after)?