Drawing maps

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dave
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#16 Post by dave » Sat Dec 29, 2007 1:41 pm

The below update is a slightly improved version with the whole of Saga of a Spy part 1: Rick Hanson, which is a quite complicated map (over 150 rooms).
http://aimemorial.if-legends.org/maps/s ... anson1.svg

It works perfectly in Opera 9.22 and Batik 1.7; the Adobe SVG viewer makes a good hack at it, put can't draw the tooltip box, Firefox 2.0.11 can't handle the automatic word wrapping of the text.

The bit I'm missing is some way of linking the tabs together better (maybe a roomlet with a href to set the other tab as active).

Thoughts and comments appreciated...

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#17 Post by Alastair » Tue Jan 01, 2008 4:18 pm

I've tried the latest map with SeaMonkey 1.1.7 (both OS/2 and MS Windows versions) and can now see the popup hints that previously did not work, however there are text layout problems with the whole map, presumably the same as you witness with Firefox.

dave
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#18 Post by dave » Wed Jan 02, 2008 10:56 am

This does seem to be a two year old bug with the way the Mozilla engine handles em units (used to allow relative font sizes, so in theory we can resize the text).

The bug url is:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=305859

As it's taken 2 years with no fix, it may be possible to replace this with %age units. That'll just leave IE as a problem...

Any comments on the layout and format? I'm interested in ideas to visually represent a link from one tab to another.

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#19 Post by Alastair » Fri Jan 04, 2008 10:43 pm

I have no idea of what you can and cannot do with svg - I had previously assumed it was a static vector format - but is it possible to have a clickable box that will take you to the relevant tab? Perhaps you could have a link in the relevant direction from a location to a clickable box, and give pairs of clickable boxes (one on each tab sheet) the same colour or label (say a number) for identification purposes.

Regarding layout, can you make the images narrower? I am viewing on 1024x768 screen on a laptop and usually do not have a larger monitor handy, I don't mind scrolling up and down the screen too much, but scrolling from side to side can be an irritation.

dave
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#20 Post by dave » Sun Jan 06, 2008 8:58 pm

It's sort of SVG and not at the same time, I use Javascript to generate the SVG to make it easier to create the map, plus I also use Javascript to allow navigation 'twixt the tabs.

I've uploaded a slightly tweaked version, shrinking the font size and room size a wee bit (you can always zoom in using CTRL + mouse wheel if the fonts are too small). Tab navigation bits (called jumps) are shown by a triangle. Thought these are a bit messy when when an east or west exit leads to a jump. I've also bought the key back.

I've found another reason for it not working on Firefox 2, FF2 doesn't implement getComputedTextLength(); but FF3 does. So, with some tweaking it works fine on FF3!

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#21 Post by Alastair » Mon Jan 07, 2008 12:31 am

Good! Now I can see the text in the tabs.

I take it the locations with a blue underline are the starting locations in each area? (Something to add to the key.)

As for the jumps, instead of a triangle would an eight-pointed star with each star point at a cardinal point be too complicated to produce?

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#22 Post by dave » Sun Jan 27, 2008 10:08 am

Hmm; an eight pointed star was a bit annoying to get right; what I did for my next map
http://aimemorial.if-legends.org/maps/s ... anded!.svg was to allow the direction of the triangle to be altered. Still not certain...

From the above map, I also added support for freetext (actually a room with no border) to help in mapping mazes (look at the Forest tab).

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#23 Post by Alastair » Mon Jan 28, 2008 10:42 pm

It looks pretty good, though we really need the Mozilla browsers to improve their SVG text handling, maybe the jump triangles that are linked from above should be inverted.

A preference of mine, and I realise everyone seems to differ on this point, is for up/down links to be double arrow-headed (when the link is two-way) with the "U" or "D" next to the arrow that points in the relevant direction.

Terry
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#24 Post by Terry » Tue May 12, 2009 9:50 pm

Gunness wrote:Ifmapper? Never heard of it - but it has a nice ring to it ;)

So what feature does this baby come with?
I use IFMapper, it's easy to use and does exactly what I want, best of all no paper!

A search for 'IFMapper' on Google will find it and you should find everything you need to know on the website. You need to install Ruby, after that it's a simple job to draw up maps for games. Connecting rooms is all straight forward, including one way exits etc. Objects can also be listed for each location, it really is a good tool to use for mapping games.

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Finn-R
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Re: Drawing maps

#25 Post by Finn-R » Fri Apr 16, 2010 11:18 am

:?
Well.. I realize that this thread is almost a year old, but being a newcomer here I just want to throw in my 5 cents.
I used to be a pen and paper guy myself, but I have found this, in my opinioin, cool gizmo.

http://www.cjmweb.net/GUEmap/

It's pretty easy to use, and what I do is after I have designed the game, I take a print of the screen and import it to windows paint. From there I can write comments to the game, objects etc, etc.

So if you are in need of a mapping tool. Give it a shot.

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Gunness
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Re: Drawing maps

#26 Post by Gunness » Sun Apr 18, 2010 4:33 pm

Hi Finn, and welcome to the forum :)

If you look a little further up in the thread, you will find others who also like GUEmap. I've only tried it briefly myself - I guess you stick with whatever tool you've grown accustomed to.

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Samwise
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Re: Drawing maps

#27 Post by Samwise » Wed May 26, 2010 11:00 am

Just thought I'd add a link in here to Interactive Fiction Mapper (IFM) 5.2:

http://fluffybunny.memebot.com/ifm.html

This isn't the same as the afore-mentioned IFMapper, though the latter GUI program supports importing and exporting to the IFM format.

IFM defines a language for recording maps and task lists. If you write up a solution in this language (there is an IFM syntax highlighting file available for Vim), you can then run it through the IFM program to automatically create a map which can be exported to PostScript etc.

Full documentation here:

http://fluffybunny.memebot.com/ifm-docs/

I haven't done a lot with it, but it seems pretty well developed and there are quite a few .ifm files available for download.

Sam.

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Re: Drawing maps

#28 Post by Samwise » Thu Jul 01, 2010 6:54 pm

I thought I'd add a brief post here with my recent experiences with Gonzalo Garramuno's GUI tool, Interactive Fiction Mapper on both Windows XP Pro and Debian Testing Linux. It's a bit of a faff to install if you're not familiar with Ruby, but the tool itself is quite good albeit a little unstable - it crashes out occasionally.

However, there is one glaring drawback - because the tool requires that all entrances and exits go to one of eight fixed points around the edge of a square room, it cannot handle any rooms that have more than eight exits/entrances in total. This is not uncommon in my experience, especially in mazes.

In the end, I've been forced to create a sort of dummy room to use as a filter into the actual room. This looks odd, and of course means that exporting an IFM file, for instance, will be incorrect - the rooms need to be manually merged by hand in the exported file.

Still, it's a useful tool - when you get past some of the oddities with the interface, it is very handy to be able to move rooms around as you explore new areas. Worth a look, but be prepared to fight with it a little.

Sam.

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Re: Drawing maps

#29 Post by Samwise » Sun Sep 19, 2010 11:11 pm

@Gunness

So ... nearly three years after you started this topic, I'm curious. What tool did you settle on? :)

Sam.

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Gunness
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Re: Drawing maps

#30 Post by Gunness » Mon Sep 20, 2010 11:53 am

Actually I'm still stuck with Visio ;) My computer skills must be in rapid decline, because after struggling with a Ruby installation for some time, I gave up and reverted to the tried-and-true. I'll have to give it a shot again at some point.
But for my money, Visio is easy to use and fairly flexible, so I'm pretty pleased with it :)

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