Creating and Editting a Map
Once you have configured the mapper, creating a map automatically is as easy as walking around your MUD. Just make sure that when you want to create a map your mapper is in Map Mode. When in Follow Mode, the mapper will follow you around to existing rooms but will not create new rooms.
While you walk around your MUD, the mapper will autodetect room names, descriptions, and exits and add rooms to the map. Rooms are indicated as squares. Connections between rooms (called Links) are drawn as lines. This simply display can be vastly enhanced by [url=\"http://www.zuggsoft.com/zmapper/zmapperinfo.htm\"]zMapper[/url].
This picture shows the mapper in follow mode.
Mapping MUD areas (zones) is a tricky business. Most MUD areas are designed to be challenging to map even by hand, so the zMUD Automapper won't always be perfect. By default, zMUD assumes the distance between rooms is the same. On some MUDs, moving between two rooms actually covers a long distance. You can drag rooms on the map by clicking them with the mouse, holding the left mouse button, and moving the mouse to drag the room. When you let go of the mouse button the room is dropped into place. Use this feature to position the rooms as needed to make a more comprehensible map.
zMUD uses the room information from the MUD to determine if you have visited a room before. Sometimes it will create a second room on top of another because it looks like two different rooms to zMUD. In most cases, it really is two different rooms, and you should drag the different rooms to other locations to make the map more readable. zMUD displays multiple rooms on top of each other by offsetting the rooms slightly.
If the mapper made a mistake and created two different rooms that are really the same, make sure they are stacked on top of each other and select the Merge option from the Edit menu, or right-click context menu. That will cause all of the rooms stacked together to be merged into a single room.
Dragging rooms to new locations and merging identical rooms are the most common manual editing tools you will use while creating your map automatically. There are many more manual editing functions described in the next page. Just remember that zMUD won't move any of your rooms around the map, it will just create them for you. To move rooms where you want them you must drag them with the mouse. However, the advantage of this is that once you have your map looking the way you want, you won't have to worry about the mapper messing it up.
Creating a Map Automatically