Zugg Software :: View topic - Scaling Problems & Ideas (hope this isnt a repeat)

Newbie Joined: 17 May 2002 Posts: 8 Location: USA

I'm quite particular about labling things, I havent done much with zMapper mind you I just got my licence back after loosing the reg (long story)

Anways to the point.

Create a text lable put it by a room and zoom in and out.. you will notice the alignment shifts..

Particularly innoying when you are exporting to GIF (havent figured out how to scale exported images yet only played around with it for like 20 min total sofar)

Also I havent found a way to link text labels to rooms. It would be a realy nice feature.. I'm not talking "lables" but somthing identifying the contents or somthing "100k mob here" or somthing for a website. The lable could be one of the existing ones.. or a "new" generic one that has a link to the room and scales with it.

Idea:
Simple/Advanced mode.. Simple means it's more point and click noticed a few things pull up some heavy looking controlls don't bother me one bit but I know how 90% of the computer users are out there.. if it's not a 2 second lerarning curve at first they are either A) going strate to the forum to whine.. B) never use the product & not give word of mouth advertising. C) Hate it and give the opsist of word of mouth..

Also (idea in title means a real idea)
What about map packs, libs of custom made Icons, tiles, backgrounds etc.. that can be imported that are propriatary to zmud. it would be good for publicity, contests could be held around it, maby give away a licence or two to the top 5 winning enteries? *shrug* It would help add alot of content to it and be virtualy free.
Along with that Custom map locators IE the ability to change the blue dot to an X.. A image of what you visualise your chariotr as.. etc..

I look forward to trying out zMapper more.. I also wonder if it incorperated into a web based interface at all.. Dynamic generation of content for a web page would be realy nice. Searching & showing rooms, Mob locations, Items, etc..

Enough I hear it already heh.. Thanks for the grate products Zugg keep it up :)

Posted: Sat Sep 25, 2004 6:11 pm

The only way to link a label to the room is with the current room label system. Right-click on a room and enter a label. You can control where the label is drawn relative to the room in the room properties.

The bugs/problems with labels have to do with the fact that the fonts in Windows are not easily scalable when using in a graphics mode like this. You really need a "vector-based" font system to handle scaleable fonts properly. That's what a lot of CAD programs do, but was beyond what I could do in zMapper. Using the bitmap-based fonts built into Windows, there are lots of problems scaling, depending upon various things:

a) what version of Windows. The newer GDI API in Windows 2000 and Windows XP handles things like this better than Win95/98/ME. I've considered making zMapper a Windows 2000/XP-only program and starting to use some of these newer GDI routines, but the current version only uses the routines compatible with all versions of windows, and that is limited.

b) fonts are different. Some fonts implement all of the various size and metric categories, some don't. It's difficult to come up with something generic that works for all fonts.

Finally, remember that zMapper is a Beta product. Things like a simpler point/click user interface always come later in the development. At the beginning, when a feature is first implemented, I do the quickest I can to make it workable, which usually involves a lot of dialog boxes. Once I play with a feature for a while and see how it should work, then a point/click/drag interface is added. I've already added a *lot* of this to zMapper, but there is plenty of stuff that can be improved. What you need to do is be much more specific about the exact thing you are trying to do and how you think it can be done easier. Making general statements like "it should be easier" doesn't actually help.

People can already create map libraries. Yeah, it's a bit crude, but it does work. There *is* a library that reads shapes and bitmaps from a file. Nobody has done anything this with. I'm no graphic artist and don't have time. It's really up to the user community to build icon and shape packs that are useful. But with only a couple hundred registered users, there is not a big enough community for this right now.

Anyway, I'm afraid that while I agree with the general tone of your message, it's too late to do anything at this point. Until I can get eMobius working and bringing in a lot of money I won't be able to work on zMapper for quite a while.