(This was posted earlier on intfic.com, but I wanted to mention it again here. This tool has had a number of updates and bugfixes, including hand-drawn maps implemented by a friendly developer Paolo Sfredda to whom I am very thankful.)
Trizbort.io is a browser-based tool that lets you easily map adventure games. Drag rooms onto your map and link them up using connections in all compass directions. Add a list of objects present in each room. Finally, export your map straight to your adventure game toolkit of choice: TADS, Inform, Quest or Alan.
Trizbort,io was inspired by Trizbort, a desktop-based mapping tool originally created by Genstein and enhanced and maintained by Jason Lautzenheiser.
Edit room details quickly
Trizbort,io lets you edit the properties of your rooms using a quick and intuitive editor. Room name and description, room colors, room borders, elliptical or octagonal rooms are supported, and also a hand-drawn style.
Add named objects with descriptions to your rooms, and create containment relationships - which will be included in your code generation later.
Generate code from your map
Trizbort,io can export your map to various adventure game development system. It supports TADS 3, Inform 7, Quest and Alan 2/3, among others. Code is generated for your rooms, connections and objects, and you can feed it straight into your compiler.
Looks pretty nice. I’ve been using occasionally it in the past, and it’s worked quite well apart from some occasional hiccups (which may have been fixed now, judging by some bug reports I browsed through).
One thing that’s a bit distracting is that with the hand-drawn style, the whole map seems to shimmer when you edit part of the map. I guess it’s redrawing the whole thing, and since the distortions are random you get slightly different ones every time?
Various people have contributed code in the past few days. Bugs were fixed, and the hand-drawn feature was added. I’m aware of the squiggly lines of the hand drawn style changing as you work with the map; that’s something that needs to be fixed. Also, the hand-drawn style is now the default and it shouldn’t be, so we’ll change that.
One thing of note is that the code now saves the map you’re working on in the browser’s local storage, so you don’t have to explicitly save your map to file every so often. It’ll just restore whatever you were working on the next time you open the app. Also, a service worker has been created so you can work offline, but that still in the testing phase.
We’re still adding small features now, and some new bugs have cropped up and these will be ironed out in the next few days.
I think https://github.com/henck/trizbort/issues/41 may have been the issue I ran into a few times, but never figured out how to reproduce. The bit about “makes the left-hand controls inaccessible” after double-clicking on an item seems hauntingly familiar.
So if that were to happen again, it would now auto-save the map?
The map would be saved when you close the browser tab, yes. It will be restored when you open the app again. However, the bug you’re referring to shouldn’t happen again.
The hand-drawn style is no longer the default; it is accessible under Render Settings (where you can also pick a quick theme to turn all the hand-drawn features on).
There is indeed a limit to local storage on the Safari browser. It is set to 5MB per domain (i.e. Trizbort gets 5MB), so that any map you create in Trizbort.io can occupy up to that much space (and it will only save one map at a time). Though this is a hard limit, it would be difficult to exceed this. The biggest map I have ever created was 139KB (and that was for a Level 9 game, which are known for boasting lots of rooms).
@fdabulich suggested moving to IndexedDB, though, which appears to give us more space yet.
I was referring to time limits. Safari has adopted a policy of clearing local storage/cookies/etc for any site that you don’t visit for seven days. (Really it’s seven days of active web browsing, it’s a slightly complicated policy.)
@zarf I misread your post, sorry about that. Storage time limits are indeed a problem. The app will have to have some sort of warning so that users know to save their map to file.
