I want to add a map system whereby the player can navigate to a specific location via an address he found.
This location can only be accessed via roads and directions the player need to follow to get there.
Obviously there will be multiple routes the player can take but without a map or some sort of guide it would be very difficult to locate the locations as I have plenty of roads and locations.
Any ideas or suggestions please.
It sounds like you want a static map instead of a dynamic one, so there are (at least) two options for that. Iâd suggest either:
Thanks will check out number two, not sure what a feelie is and how it work with inform 7
In the physical games era, feelies were extra material such as leaflets, photographs, plastic figurinesâŠ
Now, with digital games, feelies are extra PDFs, images, audio filesâŠ
So it doesnât have to âwork with inform 7â, itâs mostly external to the game. You can use ârelease along withâŠâ to distribute these files but any other distribution method is OK.
I understand but where can I learn to use it for my game map i want to display to the player?
If you want to display the map in the game, Phil wrote that you can learn that in Chapter 23 of Writing in Inform.
If you want to make a feelie, thereâs nothing to learn related to Inform so Iâm not sure I understand your question. You draw a map, you save it as my_map.png, you add it to my_game.zip.
If you are asking about the ârelease alongâŠâ instruction, that in Chapters 25.6 & 25.7 of Writing in Inform.
Thanks, will check it out
Is there a way that the world index map can be printed or converted to say a pdf or image file.
The reason i ask is because my world index map is huge and it will take me forever and a bit to recreate it as an external map file.
See this section of the documentation: §25.19. Producing an EPS format map.
This creates an EPS file, which you can convert to something more useful. I use an ancient version of Adobe Illustrator, and an ancient version of Paint Shop Pro. My ancient version of Adobe Acrobat can also convert it into a PDF, but the result isnât usable.
Thanks will check out that section
Please give me an example of how to start creating this EPS file as I am not sure how it works.
The key command is:
Index map with EPS file.
However, be warned that this system is extremely broken, and may no longer be maintained.
So to use this line of code
Index map with EPS file.
I need to add it to my project code
Then how do i access or find the EPS file?
The file is automatically created and placed in the materials folder.
You can also access the map created for the index in your projectâs .inform/index/World.html, but the images will be broken if you open the file outside of the IDE.
@Hukumuri , you can get a better map than what Inform creates by using the app Trizbort if you have a PC (i.e. it doesnât run on Mac.)
If you are able to play your game yourself, visit every location in one session, and record that session as a transcript (type TRANSCRIPT as your first command when playing), there is a function in Trizbort where you can put the transcript file in and it will generate a map from it.
This will work even if you use cheat commands during play, so long as all the movements were still achieved by entering standard direction commands.
Trizbort might get the map 100% right from this, but if it doesnât, you can edit the map to make it correct within Trizbort. You may want to edit it anyway to look nicer, colours and labels etc. And in the end you can export a PDF.
-Wade
Thanks, I will have a look and see if that will work for what I want.
what will the location of the transcript file be?
You see the problem I have is that my street map is 126(W) x 76(H) squares.
I donât want to record the movements of the game play as that will effectively be a walkthrough and i do not want that.
I want to give the complete map with street names to the player and they must figure out where to go according to clues that they need to discover in the game.
To record every square will take a long time and to recreate the map in say Trizbort from scratch will taken even longer.
It took me nearly 4 months just to complete the street map in inform and by the looks of things it will even take me longer to recreate it outside inform.
Thanks, I have noticed that.
No, I donât think you understand how Trizbort works. It looks at your transcript and makes the map for you. The order you visit the locations is irrelevant, so long as you visit them all. It doesnât produce a walkthrough, or anything in which order of execution is relevant. It produces a map. You do not have to produce anything manually, but you can EDIT the map Trizbort makes for you to fix any mistakes or add improvements.
Now that admittedly is still some work to deal with, but a lot less work than making the map from scratch.
The way I would do this, in your situation, is create a test command that walks through the whole map.
e.g.
Test explore with "n/n/n/w/e/n/nw/n/n/nw/n".
etc. If it gets too confusing to look at or type, make several commands that you can run one after the other.
e.g.
Test one with "n/n/n/w/e/n/nw".
Test two with "n/n/nw/n".
The important thing is, your tests need to walk through every room. If there are obstacles or puzzles that need solving on the way in order to access all the rooms, try to disable them in advance, or create cheat commands or a cheat mode that will allow access to any room on foot. It sounds like you might not have this problem if you indeed already expect the player to be able to reach every room.
Now, you boot your game. You type TRANSCRIPT. You type âtest oneâ and watch the test command walk through part or all of the locations. Then you test âtest twoâ, and watch it continue through the map. Once youâve run through all your tests and visited all rooms by walking, type TRANSCRIPT OFF to save the transcript (this is probably optional, but letâs be neat.)
Now is when you take that transcript file, and find the option in Trizbort that will scan it and deduce the map from it. Any final improvements can be made in Trizbort. Donât ask me for details on that as it is a detailed program with a ton of options. But I still expect this is the best way to create a quality PDF map of a huge map.
I donât know. But your interpreter will probably ask you to name it and ask you to decide where to save it when you type TRANSCRIPT, so you will find out yourself.
I appreciate that if the map is very complex, rather than grid-like, just making the test commands could be hard work. But again, unless thereâs a geographical regularity to the map that would allow you to make it manually, the Trizbort way seems the best way, without coming up with special programming.
If you have some long âstreetsâ, for instance a north-sourth street, you can paste ân/â lots of times in a row in your test command, counting each time you press paste. Once youâve got a block of 10 of them, you can copy-paste that and get ten norths in a row each time. That kind of thing.
-Wade
I did screen captures of the index map in the inform interpreter, and patched them together to produce a map in pages (Map equivalent of Word) to create a PDF map that I released with my game.
Just a thought: With almost 10000 locations, you have to somehow make sure the player doesnât get bored exploring them all. One solution could be to tell the player somehow that they are not supposed to explore every location 1-by-1, only those that are hinted at. You could also implement commands like e.g:
E10
Which makes the player go east 10 times. I do something similar in a game I am making in ADRIFT.