Hi, everyone. I’ll jump right with my question (for the easily-bored ) and put some background afterwards (for those made of sterner stuff!).
Is there a way of displaying longer names on the rooms on a map? The world I’m currently fiddling with has rooms called ‘R250’ to ‘R295’, so every room on the map is called ‘R2’.
I tried renaming the first room to ‘50’ but Inform 7 spat that out with an amusing message
I could name the rooms ‘00’ to ‘ZZ’*. The resulting map would still look pretty cryptic, but at least I could have 36^2=1,296 distinct names. (I’m not sure if that would cope with the entire game. There are about that many rooms.)
I’m using the printed name property of rooms to give them their ‘real’ names (many of which are duplicates). From a player’s perspective, it’d probably be better if the map used the printed name so the 1st few rooms would be called ‘Ss’, ‘Ab’, and ‘Rs’.
FWIW, nearly all of the Inform 7 source that I’m currently using is generated by a C program that translates files used to a multi-user game I used to play circa 1989.
*Edit: excluding pairs that are numbers, so that’d be, erm, 1,276(?) possible names.
Please see 25.23 Titling and abbreviation in Writing With Inform.
Names of individual rooms can be controlled with:
Index map with name of Radcliffe Camera set to “Library”.
(By default, the name of a room is its name in the main IF project, of course.) The smallest writing on the map is normally that used to label unorthodox or unclear exits (in particular, those going from one layer to another): this is what the “annotation” size, font and colour are used for.
For most ways to set up the map, it’s a practical necessity to abbreviate names of rooms, or they will spill out all over each other. Inform does this using the “room-name-length” setting. (The “annotation-name-length” is analogous.) For instance, if this setting is 5, then Inform will reduce the text of a name to at most 5 characters.
It might be easier to feed a transcript to Trizbort and manage that map for best customizability.
Thanks, Hanon.
I hadn’t realised, until reading your reply, that there are (potentially) 2 maps: the one in the Windows IDE and an EPS 1 output to a .materials folder. The source settings only seem to affect the latter.
I’ve also only this minute discovered that if I hover the mouse pointer over a room in the IDE map, it displays the full room name (the internal 1, not the printed name), which helps.
Yeah, that’s really cool. I’ve not messed with the EPS map, but it seems like a good way to craft one if you don’t wish to use Trizbort for whatever reason!
I’ve been mapping a lot over the past week. The IDE’s map uses the 1st 2 letters of the (internal) name of rooms. The EPS map uses a weird algorithm which, frankly, tends to produce near-gibberish!
Trizbort’s automap is awesome when it works… and very frustrating when it doesn’t! I’ve mapped about 200 rooms, though.
) and put some background afterwards (for those made of sterner stuff!).