Zugg Software :: View topic - Suggestions for improvements to the zMUD mapping

Posted: Sat Jun 19, 2004 12:55 am

I have been using the mapper a lot lately, over very large areas on muds, and have quite a few suggestions and observations about it :)

new feature ideas:

Automatically create rooms of different distance between to help with representing rooms that are further apart than usual on the MUD (eg rooms used to represent a mile of travelling over a large area)

Triggers that only work when you're in certain rooms

Resizable room boxes

Allow the links between rooms to be changed colours

Allow the creation of a group of rooms, linked together either by E,S,W,N or E,SE,S,SW,W,NW,N,NE, all in one go without having to go to each individual room. So a 'group of rooms' tool that does them in a square when you drag a box

Bug fixes (please!)
Sometimes when you click on an area near a room, usually intending to drag a selection box, as soon as you click it selects the link ending from a far away room, unless you are zoomed out when you click.. screenshot:

other stuff, how I have been finding out stuff
These are three screenshots of part of the map I have been working on of the discworld mud :)
http://img25.photobucket.com/albums/v75/xolademoness/Image1.gif
http://img25.photobucket.com/albums/v75/xolademoness/Image2.gif
http://img25.photobucket.com/albums/v75/xolademoness/Image2.gif

Here's a screenshot map I worked on for quite a while for the considerably smaller mud Aetolia (a copy of Achaea with not all that much changed, and the same idea that you can bribe the creators of the game with money to get more power for your character through the way of an absurd 'credits' system.. but enough of that ;)
http://img25.photobucket.com/albums/v75/xolademoness/aetolia.gif

Posted: Sat Jun 19, 2004 7:04 pm

Oh, being able to zoom out even further would be cool too, for when you have maps of large MUDs like the Discworld!

Posted: Sun Jun 20, 2004 10:34 am

More bugs:
> At some times the mapper part of the program seems to stop recognizing any output from the MUD whatsoever, even with "reconfigure", when moving from one room to another during that it does not detect any output. Also this means that it can't detect room changes or create new rooms in normal mode. Closing zMUD and opening it again seems to work.

> I am getting "Access violation at address 004D98E4 in module 'Zmud.exe'. Read of address 0000000C." error when I go into a new room in the MUD with mapping mode on, now.
Screenshot:
(Larger version at http://img25.photobucket.com/albums/v75/xolademoness/bugscreenshot.gif)

Please, Zugg or anyone reply? Doesn't anyone care about bugs or improving the program? :/

Posted: Sun Jun 20, 2004 10:56 am

Because of the latter above error I currently can't add anything to my map without doing it manually...

Posted: Sun Jun 20, 2004 5:05 pm

bugs:

> It's still failing to recognize any input from the MUD, when it has previously, during the same session with zMUD and not having closed it or anything. It just seems to work for a while, then break itself.
Screenshot:
(Larger version at http://img25.photobucket.com/albums/v75/xolademoness/mapperbroken.gif)

> When I close zMUD I get an Access Violation error, and when I press OK it keeps coming up for about 15 times before it stops.
Screenshot:

Wanderer Joined: 01 Jul 2002 Posts: 81 Location: USA

I had a similar problem once.

When I took a look at the spreadsheet view I found that one of the rooms had somehow gotten numbered with a negative number.

When I deleted the room everything went back to working normally.

Not sure if that is your problem, but it would be easy to check for just in case.

Posted: Mon Jun 21, 2004 9:18 am

That's not the problem, I checked :/ Thanks anyway

Wizard Joined: 15 Jan 2002 Posts: 1644 Location: USA

First alot of the times errors occurs because of a room/exit messing things up. 2nd It will be a while before Zmud is updated as Zugg is working on another project. But some of the bugs you have come across are annyoing (I get them occaisionaly too). Babble babble babble. Ok as for some of your ideas

quote:
Automatically create rooms of different distance between to help with representing rooms that are further apart than usual on the MUD (eg rooms used to represent a mile of travelling over a large area)

It would be fairly complicated if not impossible for Zmud to do this automaticly however y ou can drag a room as far away as you like manualy.

quote:
Triggers that only work when you're in certain rooms

This is Already supported see the Understanding speedwalking link link in my sig line.

quote:
Resizable room boxes

This is supported in Zmapper (Not Zmud's mapper)

quote:
Allow the links between rooms to be changed colours

Also in Zmapper I think

Some of the more exotic stuff is handled in Zmapper well the plain stuff is handled in Zmud.

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

To address the bugs you noted. I first want to say that the automapper is about as complex as things in zMud can be, because of this complexity details are extremely important.

Your first AV pic shows you stepping SE then NW. The mapper queue only shows the NW so I must assume the SE was successful, but the Current Position indicator set your room to one in which no room exists that you could have successfully stepped the mapper SE. What occurred bettween the SE and the NW?

The second pic indicating the mapper not detecting anything also indicates that you are in Follow Mode. Did you retry in Map Mode? I have personally noted some differences in how information is parsed during the Configuration Wizard and normal mapping. Also Reconfiguring uses information in your existing configuration to help with the guess work. I am again going to assume something here, your configuration became corrupted by one of the previous AV's you experienced and then was saved. I would suggest you also try renaming the .zfg file for the map to force a totally clean configuration.

Your third pic of an AV shows an address that would be in a dll. Your description of this is "When I close zMud". If you close immediately after launching does this occur? How did you close zMud? Is this even mapper related (you can test this by not even opening the mapper if it happens when closing right after launching)? Does it happen if you try to force a save of your settings with the #SAVE command? If yes to the last, have you tried to fix corrupted settings by using the methods described in the Migration Guide?

There are probably a thousand more questions that need to be asked. I don't mean to be rude about it, but without details there is little anyone can do to help. First two that come to mind at this point are OS version and MDAC/JET versions. Next that comes to mind is zMapper, installed or no (it appears to not be active)?

The last is do you have any scripts that interract with the mapper? I have heard DiscWorld doesn't map to well automatically. If you have such scripts, have you tried turning them off to see there is a change? Sometimes it really is a bug in some other command, and sometimes it just is user error. We can't tell from your screenshots.

Now that this post is about as long as possible, perhaps you can understand the delay in replying. I (and probably every other expert) was hoping that you would provide at least some answers to the above questions. I will also say that I have not experienced any AV's from the mapper, in v7.05, that couldn't be traced to bad scripting on my part. So your system is the only test bed I have. Without at least some handle on what to test and how to test it I am at a loss. What I am really saying is you are going to have to do some testing to narrow down the problem.

Edit-fixed typos