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Talahaski
Enchanter


Joined: 10 Oct 2000
Posts: 656
Location: USA

PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2003 6:27 am   

zMapper
 
Hello, since I'm up with a bad cold and cannot sleep, I figured I would post some of my thought.

For all these suggestions below, I am talking about using zMapper as a stand alone, without zMud.

1. Desperatly waiting fix to this bug - zMapper's export to .GIF file has a size limit. Most of my maps are much bigger than this size limit. When I export it, only about half of the map shows up in the .GIF file.

2. Nice to have - Getting started wizard for hex maps. The wizard will ask what rotational hex you want and how many starting hexes and what the default hex room, or the default room color will be. zMapper would then set up all the required setting for hex maps, and create a bunch of blank hex rooms all linked together. This would be very helpfull for starting a new hex map. I believe right now a lot of people are using zmud to script in the creation of a bunch of blank hex rooms, but for people not using zMud, or not knowledgable enough to write the script, this would be very helpfull.

3. Question on Hex map settings. When you set up zMapper for hex maps, are these setting global to the entire map, or are they local to the zone? My mud used both Hex rooms and normal square rooms, the Hex rooms are for the wilderness, and the square rooms for inside places like towns and castles. Can zMapper handle a zone with Hex rooms, with links to another zone with square rooms? Or do I need to keep them as seperate map databases?

4. Nice to have - Zugg, have you given thought to hosting a section on the web site for image files that people can share/download for use with zMapper. I such as drawing, especially though little icon images. It would be nice if we had a place where zMapper users and go and browse/download images for thier map. In addition people could post images for others to use.

5. I think it was talked about previously, but it would be really nice if zMapper supported higher resolution icon images. I know there are some issues with older versions of Windows where this relate, but perhaps if you treated these as a seperate object type. You would have low resolution icons, or high res icons. If the user is running on a Windows OS that does not support high res icons, then you would just disable that function for them. I'm guessing its a lot harder than I'm making it sound though.

6. Another nice to have - The ability to easily tack on, or add on additional blank hex rooms to a map. For example, I have a Hex map that is 100X400 hexes. I'd like to be able to increase it to 200X800 hexes without having to manually place 1 room on the map at a time. I would suppose this feature could only work if your existing map was a consistant rectangle, so you would just calculate the existing grid, then add to its borders. It would also be nice if you could sepecify the room type that you want all the new rooms to be. For example, you might want all these new rooms as ocean types.

7. An option to turn off the Hover of the room number, but still keep the hover of the room name if the hex has a room name. The hover of the room number gets pretty annoying with a very large map. Most of my rooms do not have a room name, I only put room names on important rooms like hexes that have a city or castle on them.

8. Drag and drop functionality. For example, If I have a empty 100X100 hex map, and I want to make quick room type change. It would be nice if I could go to the room type list,left-click and hold, then go the room I want to change, and release the mouse to automatically change the room to that new room type.

9. Undo last move. I often find myself clicking on a hex room and accidentally dragging it out of place, sometimes it is hard to get it to align back to how you had it before, especially if you have snap to grid off. It would be nice If I could just undo this one change. I would not have to keep track of multiple changes, just the last move.

10. Somewhat related to number 9 above, and this would solve the same problem I have with accidentally moving rooms. It would be nice if there was a Lock to Grid option that would prevent you from moving rooms you have already created. I would actually place this on one of my top items I would like to see added.

11. Changing many rooms all at once. There is currently no way to select 10 rooms, and change them all to a different room type. If I select 10 rooms, right click, go to properties and change the room type, it only changes the last room I selected.

Ok, I think I've given Zugg enough to think about for tonight. I think zMapper is a great product, if I didn't, I would not bother posting my suggestions.
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Zugg
MASTER


Joined: 25 Sep 2000
Posts: 23379
Location: Colorado, USA

PostPosted: Thu Jul 17, 2003 8:05 pm   
 
Let me try to respond to your questions/suggestions. But my first and most general comment is to remember that zMapper is still early in its development. I've probably put a total of 6 months into zMapper, compared to the 7 YEARS of zMUD. Given that in some ways zMapper is more complex than zMUD, it's obviously going to take a while before the quality of zMapper reaches my standards, which is why zMapper is still a BETA product.

1) I'm not aware of any limit to gif size that I have coded. However, I am using a 3rd party component for my gif routines so maybe there is something wrong with it. I'll put this on the list to look at, but honestly I have a lot of other stuff to do before this.

2) Yes, wizards for all sorts of "standard" map types are planned in the future. But that is the kind of feature that I'll probably only add once the major bugs are out and the major features are working.

3) The settings for hex maps should be stored on a zone by zone basis. So, each zone can be different.

4) Yep, there will eventually be a place to submit graphics and libraries of images and shapes for zMapper. In fact, user-submitted content is planned to be a *big* part of zMapper/zExplorer. That's why I'm currently working on the server-side scripts for stuff like this. Integration with the web is a big part of zMapper/zExplorer.

5) zMapper will support any size of bitmap that you want. zMapper does *not* use icons (the Windows icon format) for anything. All of the images are bitmap images either in BMP or GIF format. While the default bitmap size if 32x32 you can change this in the menu for the bitmap editor and create images any size you want.

6) Features like this will be added later in the development cycle.

7) zExplorer already has a way to customize the mouse-over hint field and this will be added to both zMapper and zMUD over time.

8) Drag/drop features generally have a lot of problems. My software works more on a click basis. Click on the room (or rooms) you want to change to select them. Then go to the room-type palette, select the new room type and click the Apply button. Drap/drop doesn't led itself very well to changing a large number of rooms, or rooms in a different zone.

9) Undo features will be added later in the development.

10) Hmm, there is already a "Snap to grid" option that only allows rooms to be moved to grid intersections. Is this what you mean?

11) The "Properties" dialog is only for the last selected room, so yes, that is true. But the correct way to change room types is to select a bunch of rooms, go to the Room Palette, select the new room type, and click the Apply button.

I know that zMapper and zExplorer have been frustrating for some people in terms of how slowly it is being developed. I didn't expect the work on zMUD to take 6 months this year to get it to a public status. And the fact that I have to spend many hours each day just answering email takes time away from development. So yes, development and updates to zMapper have been slow in coming, but it's something that I'm currently working on and giving priority to.

Of course, this upsets the zMUD users who want some of the minor bugs fixed, but I'm only one person and can only work on one project at a time. It takes me a while to "ramp up" to get working on a project, so it's more efficient for me to work for many months on a single project and not jump back and forth between projects.

As I've mentioned, right now I'm working on the server-side scripts for sharing maps and creating zMapper/zExplorer map databases. This has required me to learn a new scripting language (PHP) and new database system (MySql), so the learning curve has been high, making progress slow. But be assured that I *am* working on this stuff and am committed to improving zMapper and zExplorer as much as I have improved zMUD over the years.
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