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From: CardinalT <cardinalt@helpmejebus.com>
Subject: Re: New mapping tools
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Date: Sat, 09 Mar 2002 13:27:34 -0800
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Plugh! wrote:

>> The problem is having an auto-map for the players generated automatically
>> without additional information entered by the author.
> Yes, this is very hairy - it gets complicated when we get to the
> "leave to the north, but don't return by the south" scenario. That's
> why it's better that the author define the map (it also gets round
> magic words, but we are left with the quandary of how to represent the
> Swiss Cheese Room).

There is no way to represent the Swiss Cheese Room. That's why the idea of
a dependable interpreter side mapper is a pipe dream. Unless you can get
authors to stick to the necessary rules when laying out their games,
there's no way you can ever anticipate how you're going to need to draw
something in order to make a reasonable representation of it (the key word
here being "reasonable." An IF system I had in the early '80's called the
Computer Novel Construction Kit had a nice mapping feature included in it.
Problem was, if you had screwy room arrangements, you'd end up with rooms
printed all over the place, to the point where you couldn't even interpret
them anymore. This wasn't so much a shortcoming of the mapper as it was the
nature of the beast).

Moreover, I can't see how in the world you're going to have a universal
mapper that doesn't require extra effort on the part of the author. Either
you read the existing code in its native format--which means your
interpreter has to be specifically programmed to understand Inform code,
TADS code, Hugo code, and all the rest, or you make the author include
special code in the universal format your mapper understands, which is
extra work for him.

Incidentally, I wrote a fairly robust mapping library about five years ago
for Hugo, and it's been sitting at gmd for all that time basically being
ignored. It comprises an automapper, which is very much like the map in
Beyond Zork--it draws your current location and any immediately connected
locations you've visited--and a fullscreen mapper, which draws, from the
center of the screen and centered on your current location, a complete map
of every location you've visited in the game (well, as complete as your
screen size will allow, anyway). The mappers support the eight cardinal
directions, as well as up, down, in, out, and rooms that connect to
themselves. They *do not* support cross connections (the automapper does,
but the fullscreen mapper doesn't), nor "strange" connections--those cases
where A connects to B but B connects back to something other than A, or A
connects to B south, but B connects back to A northeast. (This is all
onscreen stuff, btw, available at any time via the command line, so no
printing is required.)

If you want to read about it, go download automap.zip from
/if-archive/programming/hugo/library/contributions and read automap.doc. It
gives a pretty detailed account of both mappers. If you want to see it in
action, I can email you the necessary files. Just let me know what OS
you're using.

--
--CardinalT
  Archbishop of Frith and Funeral Barker to the Stars
