What is important for people to realise, especially those wanting maps 'built in', is that the engine is 3d, maps are by definition 2d! Now it is entirely possible to generate a 2d 'map' from a 3d engine (that is how I did it for my scrolling map) but a map usually does not contain any of the following: characters, vehicles, temporary bulidings, trees and other shrubbery, anything animated, rubbish, collectables, furniture, boxes, crates, barrels etc etc etc. A map only contains features that don't move around a lot, i.e. roads, hills, large buildings (although even then it is just a shape showing the building footprint), rivers, lakes etc.
So my process was simple: Take your finished game level and make a copy of it, then delete from the copy all the stuff that would not appear in a map, especially anything that animates! I then have a Lua script which places the camera way up in the sky pointing directly down, the WASD keys manipulate the camera in the x & z planes. Move over the map from top left to bottom right screen dumping as you go. When finished use Gimp or similar in batch mode to crop the image to produce a map tile, I used 60x60 pixel square tiles, the centre portion of the image is effectively 2d. I then wrote a Lua script that takes those map tiles and produces a scrolling map.
Simples, except I can't sell it on the store because it requires too much work from the buyer!
If anyone cares the Big Escape fpm generates almost 2000 map tiles using this technique and took me a couple of hours to generate the tiles (only the latest version can handle that amount of sprites btw).
If you want a more classic style of 'map', i.e. some sort of parchment affair for a fantasy game something like an OS map then it is virtually impossible to generate automatically, the game creator has to do it, BUT if they do and chop it up into tiles my Lua script would quite happily display it.
Been there, done that, got all the T-Shirts!
