I’m writing a game with a reasonably large world map and a reasonably complicated topology, and I’m trying to get the IDE’s mapper to accommodate it. The code block:
Room-X is a room. Room-Y is a room.
Index map with Room-X mapped florple of Room-Y.
quite reasonably throws an error that the “map placement hint should either have the form ‘Index map with X mapped east of Y’ or ‘Index map with X mapped above/below Y’. Cool. But following its instructions and going with:
Room-X is a room. Room-Y is a room.
Index map with Room-X mapped above Room-Y.
throws an error that “the direction given as a hint for map placement must be a lateral direction (not up, down, above, below, inside or outside).” Inside and outside I get, but what’s the issue with moving something above or below? Is there a way of just telling the mapper that I want to put a given room on a certain z-plane, or even that I want it at a given fixed set of coordinates?
It’s an unfortunate limitation of Inform’s automapper: you can’t direct it to put rooms on a different level. I remember struggling with it for Stormrider back in 2023.
The solution is to map that room laterally from another room that’s naturally ended up on the higher or lower level. It’s frustrating, but I don’t know any other way around it.
Yeah, that’s what I’ve used for getting around the problem till now, but unfortunately the map has gotten complicated enough that that doesn’t really work in this one particular case. I vaguely remember that an earlier version of the mapper did allow explicit coordinate specification and some other low-level functions; if I’m not just making that up, are there no hooks into it (even if they involve a bit of hacking) still lying around? The mapper itself is certainly capable of automatically handling z-coordinates for rooms that have bona fide up and down directions, so I’m not sure what the technical reason would be for disallowing this feature.
I don’t think it’s specifically disallowed so much as just not implemented. I’ll see about putting in a feature request if this hasn’t already been fixed for the next version.
Awesome, thanks. Perhaps I’m just misremembering it or confusing it with another mapper, then. It’s a shame, because I do genuinely like the IDE’s automapper.
Given that those are issues are more than a year and a half old at this point, it’s safe to say that the current state of the mapper is what we’re stuck with.
I7-1980, née Mantis 2016, reported in May 2017 was fixed in current development Inform. It’s not the only Mantis era bug that’s been fixed. Almost 250 issues have been resolved since 10.1’s release.
And at the moment there are almost 200 open bugs on Inform and almost 100 improvement suggestions.
It’s a really big project with a lot of moving parts.
Sure, and software development is a slog even if you’re not doing it on someone else’s code, as a volunteer in your spare time, purely because you want to see the project succeed and reach more people. But with all due respect, that backlog is not encouraging. My solution here is to finalize the complicated game map as soon as possible, then just use an external mapper.