Trizbort, an IF mapping tool for Windows

[Genstein]

@Campbell

@I4L

Any time I hit that room, it automatically switches to the new layer or tab. I am, of course, welcome to click between the tabs, but unless it turn off automapping, if I move in the game, it snaps me back to the correct region.

Sounds familiar!

This does sound like a nice way to handle it. Ah, is there an ADRIFT feature like this? If so, cool It occurs to me I’ve never played with ADRIFT, I may have to check it out.

@I4L

Another thing… Might want to list somewhere in the automapping section of the documentation interpreters that aren’t compatible with live gameplay transcripts.

A very good point. I’ll add (Edit: have added) a section to the help for this and add Filfre to it. I tend only to use Windows Frotz and Gargoyle with Z machine games, and Glulxe or Git for Glulx games, all of which are very gentlemanly with their file locking. Nitfol works but there’s a delay of a few turns between updates since it buffers the transcript quite generously. If anyone knows of other Windows interpreters which don’t fly in this regard, do let me know and I’ll add them.

[bcressey]

@Genstein

A very good point. I’ll add a section to the help for this and add Filfre to it. I tend only to use Windows Frotz and Gargoyle with Z machine games, and Glulxe or Git for Glulx games, all of which are very gentlemanly with their file locking. Nitfol works but there’s a delay of a few turns between updates since it buffers the transcript quite generously. If anyone knows of other Windows interpreters which don’t fly in this regard, do let me know and I’ll add them.

I recommend reporting this as a feature request with Filfre / Nitfol instead. The behavior sounds like the a result of not calling fflush (or library equivalent) to sync the changes to disk after writing to a file. Doing this incurs a modest performance penalty, but it should be straightforward to implement if the maintainers are so inclined.

[Peter_Piers1 (Peter Piers)]

Well, if you’re compiling lists, the official Hugo interpreter for windows (as well as CAT, it seems) seem not to output the transcript to the text file either for several turns or for the whole game (I don’t care about the distinction - if it doesn’t output at once, it’s not good for my purposes and I just write it off).

TADS 3 HTML, or whatever it’s called… it didn’t update the transcript for several turns. I e-mailed Mike Roberts with that suggestion, and he kindly sent me a version that seemed to be part of a pre-release, so I could see whether that was what I meant. It was, and I’m using that version, but I have no idea whether that’s the version publicly available right now.

ADRIFT scripts ok, though it replaces the > symbol by Ø.

AGility the AGT Interpreter also waits several turns before updating, but I’m not sure that the format isn’t automapping unfriendly - it certainly was in IFMapper because of all the extra lines it adds, as I recall. Here’s a simple sample.

[rant]> look

Entrance
This is the entrance to the Richard Aloysius Thompson Honoris
Institute of Oncology, Molecular Gastro-Enterology, Genetic
Pathology, and a lot of other things strictly kept on paper.
Incidentally, it’s also where you work. The main gate leads
north, and there is a sidewalk on either side of you.

look

Entrance
This is the entrance to the Richard Aloysius Thompson Honoris
Institute of Oncology, Molecular Gastro-Enterology, Genetic
Pathology, and a lot of other things strictly kept on paper.
Incidentally, it’s also where you work. The main gate leads
north, and there is a sidewalk on either side of you.[/rant]

ALAN is a naughty boy that doesn’t seem to allow you to make transcripts.

Let’s skip AppleII, Commodore and Spectrum as, to my knowledge, no interpreter provides the script funciont, though it’d be greatly appreciated.

Neither Level9 nor Level9.net add the transcript functionality to games that don’t already have them.

The windows version of the Magnetic Scrolls Interpreter Magneticv2.3 also waits a few turns before dumping the text.

I believe that covers the majority. Then of course there’s the custom DOS games and windows games and browser games, all of which are entirely out of the scope of this little catalog.

[rockersuke]

@Peter Pears

Let’s skip AppleII, Commodore and Spectrum as, to my knowledge, no interpreter provides the script funciont, though it’d be greatly appreciated.

Just for completeness sake, ZXZVM (Z machine interpreter for Spectrum +3 models) transcripts to the printer as a default, and some Speccy emulators can receive printer output in a text file, which could be theorically used for Trizbort automapping purposes.

Of course there are much more recommended ways to play and/or automap Z machine IF works than using a Spectrum emulator

–

[Peter_Piers1 (Peter Piers)]

Well, yeah… but you’d be surprised at how many Spectrum games aren’t ZMachine…

[RedHatter]

I love love love this program! I’ve used GUEmap extensively, but never really liked it. I tried IFMapper, but it doesn’t play very well with linux/wine/mono, while Trizbort only has a few styling problems.

I had a few thoughts for improvement:

1. Wile auto-mapping, getting an item, drop one, something coming into the room etc. changes the description and so the disambiguating dialog opens. This is especially irritating when you have something fallowing you (e.g. the turtle in enchanter). Comparing descriptions for truncation or the opposite should be able to give a good indication whether it’s a new room or an item change.

2. Similar to #1, it would be nice for the disambiguating dialog to automatically select the option with the closest description.

3. When hovering over rooms it might be good to display the description in some way. Maybe a tool-tip?

4. Is it possible to add an option to export to gmp (GUEmap format)?

5. Display options for exporting to PDF. Very needed.

6. A way to undo last action done by program (create room, create connection, move focus, etc.) from transcript.

7. An undo button/menuitem.

Thanks for the program, it has been very useful, especially the auto-mapping.

P.S. Would you be open to releasing to source code for poking around and dev help

[I4L]

Another feature request. While not serving any useful purpose during game play or automapping, it would be hella sweet if there was an option to create regions and then assign rooms to that region. Maybe a drop down, since a room can only be in a single region.

This occurs to me as I manually type and assign dozens of rooms to regions inside of I7. Would have been so much sweeter if I could have just assigned them in Trizbort before exporting the Inform source.

[Baughbberick]

A feature request. Door support. The ability to put a door between rooms, give it a description, etc; and have it output source. Currently I’m making rooms between rooms smaller, then editing the source after.

[Eleas (Björn Paulsen)]

@I4L

Maybe a drop down, since a room can only be in a single region.

You can place one or more I7 region(s) inside another region, however.

[I4L]

@Eleas

@I4L

Maybe a drop down, since a room can only be in a single region.

You can place one or more I7 region(s) inside another region, however.

That’s absolutely true. However, it’s much easier to manually group six or seven smaller regions into larger regions in the source text than it is to group dozens or hundreds of individual rooms into smaller regions, then into larger regions.

I’m all for being able to add regions into regions and if that were available, that would be great also. Just seems like the less important feature (and the more error prone).

[Genstein]

Hey all,

I’m a bit tied up with other things for a few days, but wanted to post to say that there are some excellent suggestions here! I’ll post back with thoughts (and indeed questions) as soon as I can. Keep the suggestions coming though, if you’d like to I’m not sure how many new features I can fit into the next release as it won’t be as big a set of changes as the last release - but I can see what I can do about the top few requests at least, esp. if they’re little ones And I do plan on keeping the Trizbort versions going.

Would people prefer a uservoice style affair, or is that totally over the top for such a tiny tool as Trizbort? Thoughts welcome.

Thanks,
eg.

[Morley]

Okay, I’ve just tried this out, and already I’m somewhat infatuated with it.

I’d like to echo the requests for doors and regions, if either are at all likely. Probably not as an automapper feature, but for export purposes these would be extremely useful.

I’d also really like to be able to duplicate chunks of map using copy/paste, or something of that nature. Maybe even an option to rotate them, so a long north-south road can become an east-west road without any hassle.

Also, I’m not sure if this would be possible, but it would be amazing if there was a way for Trizbort to import project files from Inform, TADS, etc, even if the source of the project needs to be neatened up a bit before it’ll work.

I’ll definitely be looking out for new releases of this.

[Campbell]

It’s on my to-do list to create an Import and Export to Trizbort from ADRIFT. Should be pretty straightforward as they’re both XML (in case you wish to do the same ;- )

[DataBasic]

First of all I’d like to congratulate you on such a fantastic mapper

I’d like to see the ability to colour each map room a different colour. Something along the lines of select a bunch of rooms and turn them all the same colour to save time and effort.

When selecting a line style i don’t want it to be remebered the next time i go to draw a new connection - clearing out the up/down in/out text can become a little tedious when mapping manually.

Any news on a likely release date for the next version?

[DataBasic]

I print off a lot of maps on A4 and A3 paper, and spend a while organising the maps so as not to print a location halfway off the edge of a page. What would be nice is to be able to see maybe a feint outline that denotes each A4 page so that i can avoid straddling 2 pages with one room.