Zugg Software :: View topic

Beginner Joined: 04 Dec 2003 Posts: 11 Location: USA

Here are a few suggestions I came up with!

1st. Have option for the last zone you use reload on startup.
2nd. Place zones as a pull down like servers.
3rd. Add these to the show list for SWG icons. Cloning Facility, Shuttleport, Starport, Vendor, Theater, Hotel, Housing.
4th. correct the north and south coords along with making coords enter as x,y.

Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2004 10:34 pm

(1) I'll add that to the to-do list

(2) After giving this some thought, I'll go ahead and add a "flat zone list" to a pulldown box

(3) I don't really want to have a different icon for every different item. It would be easy to get carried away and then people would ask for a different icon for each different crafting machine or trainer. I tried to make icons for the types of building that you use the most when you enter a new city you are not familiar with. With this in mind I can see adding an icon for cloning, shuttleport, and vendor. But honestly, the Starport doesn't need an icon since it is always the huge building that is easy to identify, and the square city icon is usually placed over the starport already. And I haven't found much use for the Theater, Hotel, and Housing buildings yet unless something has been added to the game recently. Seems like the generic "building" icons are ok for those.

(4) From what I recall, coordinates in SWG are listed as Latitude,Longitude not as X,Y. Is this wrong? Remind me what is wrong with the north/south coordinates.

Beginner Joined: 04 Dec 2003 Posts: 11 Location: USA

yes SWG coords are lat&lon but the problem may be SWG then. instead of reading lat to Lon they are reversed. so every time you enter the coords you have to swoop them.
as for n/s watch the coords indicater on the bottom right of zExplorer. north and south are backwards. so if you enter a north coord it ends up on the southside of the map.

Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 7:39 am

Ahh, ok, thanks for clarifying this. I'll certainly fix the north/south issue. The Lat/Long issue is a bit trickier. The standard cartography terms give Latitude first and Longitude second. That is: Y,X. So, computer programmers are obviously going to want to use X,Y instead. And this is fine if you use X,Y coordinates and not latitude and longitude (which is how Horizons does it). But by putting the N/S and E/W at the end, they are using latitude and longitude and *not* X,Y cartesian coordinates.

For example, the Hint book for SWG properly lists coordinates in the Latitude,Longitude format, as does the other web sites I have looked at. So, it seems like it's the in-game display that is backwards. But I'll have to look at it and decide.

Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 7:40 am

Btw, if you want to swap them yourself you can copy the SWG entry in the zexplorer.txt file into a usergame.txt file and then change the ShowNS option to 0 instead of 1. That will cause the new version of zExplorer to display coordinates as X,Y. So that gives the order you want, but this also will strip the N/S and E/W from the coordinates.

Beginner Joined: 04 Dec 2003 Posts: 11 Location: USA

only major problem I see this may cause. is if someone goes to copy coords to create a waypoint in game and doesn't realize they are backwards.

Posted: Wed Jan 14, 2004 2:25 am

As requested, I've added icons to SWG for cloning facilities, shuttle ports and space ports, and vendors. Also, the new version of zExplorer fixes the N/S problem in SWG and also the problem that was causing icons to disappear when you selected a server and was causing the Update Datafiles to not put locations into the correct zone or server (causing icons to appear in the galaxy map).

Just download the new version, then use the Update Datafiles to get the latest data. Should work *much* better now, so let me know how it's working. Once it looks like it's working better, I'll post announcements to various SWG web sites. Thanks for all of your help in debugging this for SWG!!

Beginner Joined: 04 Dec 2003 Posts: 11 Location: USA

Works like a charm, many gratsy Zugg!
The last few days I have been roaming the planets of Corellia, Dantooine, Yavin, Endor, and Naboo collecting Interest Points and physically checking there coords. I have come to find that the POI's in the datapad that SWG has mad known tend to be off location. which comes in handy that it doesn't put you dead center of 20+ unfriendlies. the good thing about this is I have earned 15 or so visitation badges.

If you want to send me a banner, link or something for zExplorer, I can add them to my SWGPCS sites.

Posted: Wed Jan 14, 2004 8:04 am

Cool! Glad it's working better now. I try to put together a zExplorer banner tommorow. I'll need one if I plan to advertise on something like WarCry anyway.

Beginner Joined: 04 Dec 2003 Posts: 11 Location: USA

I have come to the conclusion that I have had a "brain fart". I have a gif image of our Player City and was wanting to add it to our planets map. So please slap me on the head and refresh my memory pls!!!!!
Galileo

Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2004 7:32 pm

Yeah, the procedure is a bit tricky, and certainly only for advanced users. It also requires zMapper:

1) Go into zMapper and load the SWG.MDB map database.

2) Click on the Palette tab

3) Click on the pulldown menu in the Palette tag and select Images

4) Click the New button to add a new image...enter a name.

5) Now right-click the new image you just created and select Edit Bitmap

6) In the bitmap editor, select File/Open and open the image file you have. If the image isn't in GIF or JPG or BMP format, simply use the Resize Bitmap menu option to set the size of the canvas to the size of your picture, then open your image in any other graphics program and select Copy. Then back in the Bitmap editor in zMapper, select Paste, move the cursor so that the image starts in the upper left corner and click the mouse to place the pasted image. Then click the Pencil tool in the toolbar to deselect the pasted image and update it.

7) Click the 3D box icon in the upper right corner to tell it not to do any other default drawing, then click the green checkbox to save your changes. Close the bitmap editor.

8) Now that the image is loaded, the next step is to set the properties so that the image is scaled to whatever box you choose. Double-click the image you just added in the palette tab to open the Properties.

9) In the properties, turn on the Scale Bitmap option and also turn on the Draw as Background option so that the city image will be placed UNDER other location icons as part of the background image. Close the properties window.

10) OK, now you are ready to place your image on the map. Select the zone for the planet you want, then zoom into the location of the city on the map. Select the Graphics Object tool in the main toolbar on the left and click the down-arrow next to the tool to select the image of your city (it is probably already selected as the current image). Click somewhere on the map to place your image.

11) Now you need to scale the image. You can right-click on the image you just added to the map and then drag the resize handles to scale the image. But that won't preserve the aspect ratio. It is best at this stage if you add two locations to the map that you can line up with your image, such as buildings or trainers. Double-click the image to bring up the image properties and you can tweak the X,Y position as well as the Dx,Dy size of the image here. By changing the Dx,Dy values manually, you can ensure that the resulting aspect ratio is the same as what you started with. This step takes a while. You will alternate between changing the X,Y offset to line up one of your locations, then change the Dx,Dy scaling to line up the other location. If you find a better way to do this, let me know, but this is how I did all of the other city maps.

12) OK, that's it. If you use this procedure your bitmap image will be stored within the database file itself and will be uploaded for other users. So, try not to use a huge image with lots of colors or else your map database will get huge and people will curse the long downloads.

13) If you'd like, instead of storing the bitmap in the database file, I can add it to the database server as one of the GIF files downloaded when you update the datafiles. To do it this way, rather then using the Edit Bitmap to import the image, simply double-click on the new image you just added to the Palette with the New button to open the properties and enter the filename of the GIF image in the properties (so this replaces steps 5-7). Then send me the image to put onto the database server. The advantage of doing this is that when the bitmap is stored in the database, it is an uncompressed BMP image. When you use an external file reference, you can use GIF images or JPG images that are compressed. Since zMapper takes the color in the upper-left corner of the bitmap as the transparent color, even JPG images can be handles as transparent images in this way.

Hope that wasn't too complicated. It's probably easier to do than to explain. But it's not your fault...I don't think I have documented this very well.

Beginner Joined: 04 Dec 2003 Posts: 11 Location: USA

my only problem is I don't have zmapper, and used up my trial

Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2004 8:14 pm

There isn't any way to do it without zMapper I'm afraid.

But actually, it's just as well. I realized last night that a major step is missing in this. There currently isn't any option in zExplorer to publish a "graphic object" like a city map to the remote database. There is an admin-only function but it publishes *all* graphical objects, which is how I originally uploaded the city maps. I forgot to add an option to publish a single object for regular users.

I'll make sure this gets added to the next version of zExplorer though.

Btw., send me a private email on this subject so that I can add some other information for you.