From senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!newsswitch.lcs.mit.edu!sunqbc.risq.qc.ca!newsfeed.newzpig.com!news.newzpig.com!forbes Thu Mar 21 11:22:23 2002 From: Scott Forbes Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction Subject: Re: [Inform] Map creation utility References: <1007765094.759308@sidehack.sat.gweep.net> User-Agent: MT-NewsWatcher/3.1 (PPC) Date: Sat, 08 Dec 2001 23:53:25 +1300 Message-ID: Lines: 36 Path: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!newsswitch.lcs.mit.edu!sunqbc.risq.qc.ca!newsfeed.newzpig.com!news.newzpig.com!forbes Xref: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu rec.arts.int-fiction:87697 In article <1007765094.759308@sidehack.sat.gweep.net>, "Brian Payne" wrote: > 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. I've written a utility that does something similar to this (Yonk 1.0b1 for the Macintosh), but it displays the map one room at a time -- in the Map Viewer there's a button for each direction, allowing you to explore the game's map, and in the Object Editor the direction buttons have pop-up menus which allow you to assign exits. I found it difficult to code a full-screen display of a game's map, though. Building a map for anything other than a simple grid becomes challenging; you have to deal with compass directions like "up" and "in" (or, in the worst case, "left" or "starboard" or whatever fever dream the author came up with to replace the library directions), and trying to display the "maze of twisty little passages" in ADVENT will tie a knot in your screen. There's also the case where the author writes an Inform subroutine for an exit, which Yonk handles by simply displaying the subroutine; a full-fledged mapping program would have to interpret the code somehow (and would possibly require an AI smart enough to play the game). You didn't say what platform you were writing on, but if you're using Windows you may want to see whether IF-IDE or Inform Explorer helps any; looking at their web pages I'm not sure whether they have the features you're looking for -- but hey, at least they *have* web pages, which is more than I can say for Yonk at the moment. :-) -- Scott Forbes forbes@ravenna.com