I’ve written an extension that maintains a 3x3 mini-map in the status bar of an Inform 10.1.2 game (it might work in other versions, but I only use 10.1). The map draws automatically.
It uses @mathbrush 's Bisquixe to print adjacent rooms as hyperlinks. This is especially convenient for phone play. The code and a short web demo (there’s a gblorb, too) can be found here:
And hey, this is me, I’m sure the code is not super sophisticated, as I’m just a beginner, but hopefully it might be handy to someone. Once Bisquixe is configured, it should just be plug and play.
I’ll upload it to Friends of Inform in a couple of weeks if it doesn’t blow something up.
On my phone your demo forces the browser (Android Chrome) into landscape mode, which means the on-screen keyboard then covers pretty much the entire display. Do you know if this is a Bisquixe thing, or if it can be configured?
Right, it’s letting me play in portrait now which is a lot closer to working smoothly! A couple of locations (monitoring and lab) sometimes seem to cause the status bar to disappear when you enter them?
oh? what locations are those? I wonder if it is sensitive to your screen’s size. The actual status bar is just fancy status from ES’s basic screen effects. There’s no magic or i6 stuff at work
Edit: I poked around on my phone some more and I can’t get the status bar to disappear. But if there are more details I want to look into it.
The output looks like a good balance between wanting it a bit more graphical (at least ascii graphical) while preserving space.
I kept saying over time, I didn’t know why more Inform people didn’t use Mark Tilford’s Automap extension. Maybe it was just out of commission for too long? It required the work of I7 extension folk to get it going in 6M62, then Inform got another new version and I see no 10.x-compatible version of it.
Automap did take a lot of screen real estate, whether you zoomed it or not. So your extension has an appearance like zoomed Automap, but just for one room.
I remember you mentioning the extension and looked into it! But I’ve been committed to 10.1 for, well, nearly all of my time with Inform.
I definitely could have depicted more geography, but my project needs the right and left columns for other information so 3x3 seemed like a sweet spot for the project.
