Having a list of location names that point to a single image would also help in the case where a room name changes, such as from “Outside a grey building” to “Outside the Post Office”. The game “Dreamhold” has a couple places where a room can have eight colours.
A rare problem I belatedly thought of is the issue of mobile rooms (or at least have rooms with no initial fixed location), for example, in “Domicile” or “Photopia” or “Dreamhold” or “Hell: A Comedy of Errors”. Probably not much that can be done about that, but fortunately, this almost never happens, despite my being able to think of four games that do it.
I see what you mean, maybe for these games a map can be designed where the mobile room is either in its own map (being the only room in the map, like the attic in the demo game) or drawn separately from the fixed rooms in the map, something like how Hawaii is represented in maps sometimes.
The cluster of islands in its own inset is a reasonable solution for all the games I mentioned except “Hell: A Comedy of Errors”. That one is a case where, although a map would be useful, I don’t think any plug-in mapper can help since it’s the player deciding which rooms go where for practically every room other that the starting room. It really is one case where the author either has to create their own in-game mapping solution, or not bother and let the player deal with mapping as usual.
It’s funny when I start thinking of other games with weird maps. Threediopolis is a game where a map would be very easy to make, where all the streets are in a regular grid, with stores and homes connected diagonally to the grid intersections, but such a map would be somewhat misleading for a player to look at.
OK! Let’s get the ball rolling. I made a zorkmid map for Mammal. I chose the game to test this as it has just about enough rooms to justify a map, but not so many that it’d take me ages to work on. For those wanting to follow in my footsteps, here are the steps I took.
Step One: I drew the map of the whole game on a piece of A4 and took a picture of it.
Step Two: I ran it through an online photo-editor to get rid of the jpeg artefacts and smooth it up a bit.
Step Three: From the full map, in a simple paint program, I cut away everything bar the first room. I filled the whitespace with the transparent fill. I saved this as the first room.
Step Four: I repeated Step 3 for all the other rooms.
Step Five: I took the original image and in GIMP I used the smudge tool to blur away all the rooms, just leaving the basic outline of the building. I decided to include a title and some game instructions in the background map. This image I saved as _base.png.
Step Six: I zipped up the images with the original game as described on the Zorkmid website, then I sent the file to roylaza.
My main worry with the process was that there wasn’t guidance on a good size or aspect ratio so I don’t know how good the map will actually look in the zorkmid viewer. I suspect the landscape view might look squashed in the browser.
As Roy says, the game’s working great with Zorkmid now. Here’s the link. I’ve also updated the Mammal page on IFDB and created an associated news story. Hopefully, this might inspire someone with more illustrative chops to take a shot at this.
Toggle map between scaled mode and drag mode (being able to drag the un-scaled map around inside the map area) - accessed by the new zoom icon in the top right corner - this is best demonstrated in Mammal.
Click on any word in the story to inject it into the input line
Shift click any word in the story to examine it (injects “examine [word]”)
Ctrl click any word in the story to get it (injects “get [word]”)
A suggestion: code/rule hooks, or a true/false switch to -not- display/update the map, say if the PC is temporarily blindfolded, or if the player needs to locate an actual map in game before seeing it.
Given my work on ifpress.org, would you be interested in helping out with widgets? I don’t have a platform ready yet, but eventually I’m looking for widgets similar to Zorkmid that an author could “drag-drop” onto a story template.
This would be some JS (or TypeScript) and HTML, possibly in a React jsx format and an I7 extension.
I haven’t had a chance to look at ifpress yet, but I’d be happy to help out if I can, maybe I could create a version of Zorkmid that will work with ifpress.
I like the new effect (but I had no problems with the flashing either). Do you think it could be an option to have a little character appear on the map? Say, if there was a folder “character” containing the same subfolder structure as the game (“House”, “Basement”, etc), there could be one png with a character drawn at the right place per room. You wouldn’t have to worry about where to put the character on the map since it’d be already at the right place, you’d just have to remove the previous png and show the new one. Plus, an author could have different sprites for different rooms (for instance if they wanted to draw shadows / take the change in light into account, or make the character look scared/cold/other in a specific room, etc.).
I haven’t kept the ball rolling with another map, but I found a few websites to have 3D models of things like houses : SketchUp, RoomSketcher, FloorPlanner. (And The Sims, of course.) It could be helpful for those (like me) who can’t draw; I was thinking maybe trying to use it for Shade, which would also be a good way to test that a non-standard (but not too complicated either) status bar works with Zorkmid.
Character layer (or maybe we can generalize it as an Overlay layer) sounds interesting, it is definitely do-able and will probably be added in the very next version.
Shade sounds great! ever since Mammal has been added I’ve started to see a lot more engagement in the website (which is to be expected) and Shade will drive in more, also just sharing the website and spreading the word will help get the ball rolling as well, and get more people involved in mapping old and new games, and the software will evolve as well as a consequence.
Sorry to resurrect a very old thread but I was going through my old posts and was wondering if there’s interest in human-designed maps like Zorkmid offered, if there is I might be persuaded to restart the project, probably making it a lot simpler and maybe adding auto-navigation like I did for Parchmap (Parchmap - automatic mapping, navigation, autocomplete, notes and more)
