From senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!news-out.cwix.com!newsfeed.cwix.com!feed2.news.rcn.net!feed1.news.rcn.net!rcn!not-for-mail Thu Mar 21 11:22:22 2002 Path: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!news-out.cwix.com!newsfeed.cwix.com!feed2.news.rcn.net!feed1.news.rcn.net!rcn!not-for-mail From: "Brian Payne" Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction Subject: [Inform] Map creation utility Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 14:46:31 -0800 Organization: GweepCo Cooperative Network, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA Lines: 46 Message-ID: <1007765094.759308@sidehack.sat.gweep.net> X-Trace: UmFuZG9tSVaIfFndkcf0YxKInZsfD5Vi0DVyAm0eiyoY6UIUIpv5nE9jTlnJVX9i X-Complaints-To: abuse@rcn.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 7 Dec 2001 22:44:55 GMT X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.3018.1300 X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Cache-In: nntpcache 2.4.0b5 (see http://www.nntpcache.org/) X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.3018.1300 Cache-Post-Path: sidehack.sat.gweep.net!unknown@206.63.156.65 Xref: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu rec.arts.int-fiction:87671 Hi. :) I'm new to the I-F scene, not counting my Zork infatuation back in the 80's (actually, I thought IF -- or text adventures, as I thought of them -- were dead!). I've been poking around, lurking quite a bit, and mostly sticking to myself while I plotted and played around with Inform, for several months now. And now, I'm realizing that I'm particularly poor at writing games. :) But, I enjoy creating *tools*. What I'm wondering is, would anyone -- once I get it rolling, of course -- be willing to betatest an Inform map creation utility? What it boils down to is, I got REALLY frustrated while working with Inform and map/room creation. It's actually pretty simple, but it's also somewhat tedious, and I'm very bad at mentally picturing how a map is laid out. Looking at it, I don't see *too* much difficulty (I know, I know, FLW) in creating a visual map that generated Inform code -- JUST for room definitions, and so on. For me, at least, it'd be VERY useful, since I could then forget the tedium associated with many of the rooms in a typical map and just let the util generate the code for them. Note that I'm not talking complex code, or anything -- you'd still have to work with some things manually to get the right effect out of your game -- but I'm thinking that anything that takes you from the concept stage to the testing/improving stage faster is worthwhile. Quick caveat: once I get the time, I'm intending to develop this in C (likely using DJGPP, but that's not a guarantee) so it'll be portable. During the prototyping phase, though, I'll be using Visual Basic (ugh!), so you'll need either a Windows system or an emulator if you want to test (WINE will likely work, for example). (Actually, there's more to it than that, but I don't want to bore people. If you want to know more, just email me [or post, I suppose] and I'll happily discuss it. :) So... anyone interested? Brian Payne sofaspud at sofaspud dot org