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Beginner Joined: 31 Jul 2006 Posts: 18

I have a mdb map zone built on a 240x240 grid. The problem is that the map has become way too populated. Is there a way to double the spacing for all elements in this zone to sit on 480x480 grid?

Wanderer Joined: 25 May 2006 Posts: 88

AFAIK the only way to do it is manually for existing rooms (That is how i did it anyhow).

Beginner Joined: 31 Jul 2006 Posts: 18

This zone has well over 2,500 rooms and I have 2 others almost as big. I'm not really looking forward to the manual thing.

Sorcerer Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 706 Location: USA

The only thing I can suggest is split up your zones into four sections. Let's say you have a zone called "ZoneA" which has a 240x240 grid.
What I would do is split it up into "ZoneA-west", "ZoneA-east", "ZoneA-south", "ZoneA-norht" giving each one a full 240x240 grid size.

Beginner Joined: 31 Jul 2006 Posts: 18

The problem is that this particular city map has a ton of small houses between each road segment to the point where some houses overlap at intersections. I just need the whole map doubled in size to fit them in nicely.

Sorcerer Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 706 Location: USA

It is still do-able to split the map up. You just highlight a group of rooms, then say move to new zone. Just make a backup copy of the map before you try it.
If you don't like what you did you can always go back to the backup map.

Posted: Mon Jul 31, 2006 5:55 pm

Have you tried just going into the View menu, then select Grid and then change the X and Y spacing values for the grid? If you change them from 120 to 60, then you have essentially doubled the grid. Then just zoom in a bit and it should work fine.

Beginner Joined: 31 Jul 2006 Posts: 18

To me it appears that a room draw on the map is a square of size 120x120 so just reducing the grid size from the view menu will not give me more on screen real estate as the room square size remains fixed at 120x120 (AFAIK). If I could set zMud to draw room squares at a size of 60x60 all would be well.
Also grid settings are global in nature and I did not want to upset the other 63 zones in this mdb.
I think all that I really need is a button/application/magic wand to double all of the X/Y co-ordinates in the spreadsheet view for a particular zone.

Posted: Tue Aug 01, 2006 4:43 pm

Ahh, that's true. Using zMapper you can change the default room size and that would allow you to change the base definition to be 60x60, but it's complicated and a bit buggy.

If you have zMapper installed, then within zMUD you can use the zMapper COM scripting interface to loop through all the rooms and adjust the X,Y coordinates. But I'd definitely make a backup of your map *.MDB database before messing with it. You could do this to only rooms in a certain zone.

Also, since zMapper uses the Microsoft Access *.MDB database format, you might be able to find someone with MS Access that could write a simple program to loop through the rooms and adjust the X,Y values.

Beginner Joined: 31 Jul 2006 Posts: 18

Total success:
- Extract zones with zone copy
- Open mbd with access
- copy co-ord data
- paste in excel (I used excel as access is just pfffft)
- copy colum next to data (has multiply x 2 formula)
- paste back into access
repeat for each column of co-ord data (about 20 columns)
- paste zones back in to master map

Thanks for the help.

Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2006 12:29 pm

Cool! That's a clever solution...glad you got it to work.

Apprentice Joined: 26 Sep 2001 Posts: 124

Damn... that is impressive as I've spent hours and hours trying to do exactly that in the past.

Thanks very much for sharing the solution :)

Beginner Joined: 31 Jul 2006 Posts: 18

Just a quick brute force method, If it was anything I needed to do more than once I would write a script or such. Also you will still have a bit of work squishing your buildings back onto the 240x240 grid. If you have any zoned buildings you wish to keep on the 240x240 grid make sure you don't copy them across with zone copy (Remember what gets linked where as zone copy will not).
After playing for a week with all my town roads "double spaced" I can highly recomend doing this as it is working really well. The 480x480 grid size is ideal and has allowed me to consolidate many zones back into the town master map. Sometimes with very detailed parts I had to set the grid back to 240x240 but this was rare.
Looks nice too ;)

Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 2:53 pm

I guess my question is similar to this, but in reverse.
I'm mapping and rather than go #99 e, I go #99 w.
My map is now 99 rooms longer the wrong way.
I delete the rooms.
The extra spacing is still there.
Where exactly do I go in the access file to change that. And what is the smallest size I can make it?
I mean, if I set it to 0x0 as opposed to 240x240 will that screw it up?
Also, how do I know WHAT to set it to?
I mean, some zones are wide, some tall...some sqaure.

Help?

Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 5:15 pm

If you select the Zone/Refresh menu option that will cause zMapper to loop through all of the rooms in the current zone and recalculate the bounds of the zone.

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 2:23 am

errr....was that to me? cause I don't have zmapper....
Just that mapper that comes with zmud

EDIT: oooooo....looks like it works on the regular mapper as well....
Damn, and I'd restarted like 3 zones cause i kept screwing up directions and couldnt stand that there was like 99 spaces north and west that made the map looks crappy :-)