Very nice. I’ve been hoping that Trizbort2 would have some kind of feature that could be applied to multi-level maps so I’m very pleased to see these tabs which could be used towards this purpose.
It has always really bugged me that there hasn’t been a good mapping program all this time that can elegantly represent the elevator in “Lurking Horror.” I look forward to mapping it with Trizbort2!
Have a long way to go with this, so hopefully it turns out as well as I hope.
If anyone has feature requests, please feel free to post them here and I’ll see what I can do and how it fits with the plans I have.
Awesome! I’ve been glad I can just have something in Trizbort, and just seeing the images has me realizing how I want to reorganize certain maps. If/when this gets done, it might help spur a maintenance release.
Will we be able to have connectors between rooms on different levels of a map project? E.g. in your Zork example, there’d be something down from the living room to the passage, and you could click that link to change levels.
While I’ve not figured out how best to handle that, I did fell that was a pretty important thing to have, so the plan is to have something like that in there.
Not much progress this past week, though I did start working on adding dockable windows in Trizbort2. Will allow for moving multiple maps around as well as dockable property windows and such. That’s something I’ve wanted in Trizbort myself for a long time.
I did do some thinking on the whole Trizbort2 thing though and thought I’d throw a few things out there to see what others thought. Maintaining the existing version and working on version 2 eats up a chunk of time. I’ve thought about setting up a Patreon or at the very list a Paypal link in case any one in the world felt the urge to contribute in that sense. I know I won’t make a living off of it, but would be nice to perhaps even offset some costs of some tools perhaps. Does anyone have any thoughts on that?
Speaking of tools, that brings up another point. There are some tools / controls that I would love to use, but they are commercial components…now I don’t have a problem paying for them, but I’m wondering how I would be able to keep the software open source if a key component of it is not. So I would love to use those tools, but does that mean I need to close source the application (I could still keep it free, just no source provided)…thoughts on that?
And then to my final point…if I would close source it, take donations for development or even perhaps provide a paid professional version or something (no plans for this, just thinking way ahead)…should I change the name from Trizbort to something else? I’ve gotten permission from Genstein to use and promote Trizbort when I first took over maintaining it (@AndrewS and I exchanged emails with him)…and I even purchased the domain which he had no interest in…however, in the spirit of things, I’m questioning whether I should rebrand it and make it truly my own (with version 2 of course)
Anyway, just thinking out loud on this Saturday morning and wondered if anyone had any thoughts.
Personally, I’m more likely to make a one-off donation (not that it’d be a big one) although I have a hunch that a patreon is the better way to go, so optimally, I’d like to see you set up both options.
I know nothing about the licensing stuff although I imagine it comes down to the licensing of each tool used.
If you use a tool that requires Trizbort to change its licensing, I think, yeah, I would vote for changing the name of the project.
Well, financially, Patreon can (sort of) work as a one-off donation, or you can set aside a chunk of money for it.
David Welbourn’s Patreon is based on $1 per walkthrough. Some months he does nothing at all, or even just gives a few walkthroughs that “don’t count,” so you don’t have to donate anything.
So maybe a way to do this would be to have a list of concrete goals and people could donate, say, $1 per goal achieved and reasonably tested. So in this case you could donate until a bunch of features were completed, then un-subscribe if you wanted. The problem is that it must be emotionally painful (even if only a little) to get unsubscribed. And I don’t have an answer to that, sadly.
So I’ve made absolutely zero progress on anything…so this is a non-progress update.
I was thinking about something the other day though and thought I’d throw out an idea for a feature of Trizbort that I would find useful and wanted to see if anyone else would. I was thinking about adding integration with GitHub or Git in general. This would make working with versions of your maps easier. Would this be of benefit to anyone? Does it sound like a feature you would use if it was in there?
I have to admit I don’t know what integration would entail. Does it mean automatic updates? Or would the binary be online? At any rate it’d be nice to be assured that the map version matched okay, although I usually am able to go through and save/update them manually or with a batch file now that we have command line parameters.
I guess how I envisioned it (and I admit I haven’t thought it through completely yet) is that you would be able to commit changes from within Trizbort, browse through changes / old revisions, pulling them down as needed or doing comparisions to current working version, being able to push them to github or bitbucket, things like that. Basically helping with the workflow. Often multiple git command line can be wrapped up under one menu item.
Nothing that you couldn’t necessarily do outside of Trizbort in your normal git command line or client, but like many other development tools that have integrations, it would provide convenience of doing everything within the app itself.
Trizbort files are easy to work with in source control since they are just text and in Trizbort 2 I’m looking at converting the file format to JSON files (with ability to import classic trizbort files)
Again, not thought through completely and simply in the early blue skying phase.
I think it sounds like a neat idea. I’m not sure how much I’d use it for its revision-tracking benefits, but I have a hard time going, “there, I’m done” with my maps and uploading them places so I’d appreciate the convenience of keeping stuff online where others can check them out.
It would be pretty awesome to have, yeah. I just never considered that’d be possible. But now you mention it, it seems like it.
And yeah an online mapping repository would be neat.
This is something I’ve put in my own github projects. In fact it can sometimes make up my daily commit. And they’re never that bad to tweak. Of course it sometimes seems you’re never quite -done- with a map–there’s always one connection that wasn’t perfect. So maybe you can make a maps repository? I’d guess you could also add unusual maps to the samples already in the Trizbort repository. I just added ones that stood out to me that showed Trizbort’s features.
So not much work done since my last post…the fall is just a rough time for me to get anything done. I coach football and that takes up much of my free time from August till now. Throw on top of that starting a new job in August and then my Cleveland Indians in the World Series (glad I didn’t make any side bets with you @AndrewS) nut much was worked on.
However, I did fix a bug in Trizbort and put it up on GitHub the other night so that counts for something. Glad to see others are still here…sad to see Peter going. Hoping to get somethings done over the winter here because in late February, my free time is eaten up again as I coach baseball as well. 
That’s…a lot of coaching! But I bet it is rewarding. I’ve thought of volunteering as a chess coach & posts like this remind me to just get on with it.
Re: new coding, even a few minor fixes can get things going. It makes up for the times I’ve stalled on a minor roadblock.
And about bets, well, I hope you found a few Golden State fans to bet with a few months ago!
Tangent: it’s a bit of a cliche but it is important to move on and do cool things win or lose after something like that. I remember a coworker discussing a tough Blackhawks’ playoff loss (2014 Western Conference finals) and how he talked about it with his kids. Not a Hawks fan but it was neat to hear. Moving on and doing stuff after a sports event big or small, win or lose is important. Glad you have!
Oh and reading Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby is good too if you haven’t. The story may be about soccer in England, but it’s about more than that.
Tangent over, and I still do need to respond to your question about my one feature request from like a month ago. Short answer is, I didn’t think of all the possible options, and it’s not critical.
The coaching is very rewarding. I’ve been doing it for about 15 years now and have moved from youth into high school. Keeps me busy but well worth it. I’d recommend you do it if you have the opportunity to…
I had one of my coaches tell us when I was young, that he’s out there not to make us super stars or to play professionally some day, if that happens then great, but no he’s out there to teach us to love the game, so that when we are his age we will come back out and teach the next generation to love the sport as much as we do. Good words for sports or anything really.
I know a few Indians fans that were barely able to function after the loss…but I’ve learned long ago that regardless of win or lose (talk about sports, elections, whatever), I’m still getting up in the morning…gonna kiss my wife and kids goodbye and head off to work and be thankful for it. Not worth getting too worked up over. But what a game 7 that was…probably one of the best baseball games I’ve watched even though my team lost.
It felt good to fix even that one small issue in Trizbort…just to get back in there and work for a bit in there, so I’m itching to get back in and do more work. Progress on Trizbort 2 has stalled, but would love to get back into that also.
Any progress is always good progress. It’s easy to get discouraged because one’s project doesn’t move forward at super speeds and we feel that others out there accomplish things much faster, but hey, life happens and I don’t find progressing by smaller increments is any less satisfying.
Anyhow, the coaching sounds great, and glad to have you back!
Yes, I agree, tangent here about love for the game and why it’s more than a cliche: I remember as a kid I wanted to do sports even if I wasn’t on the school team or whatever, but “jocks vs nerds” is an easy trap to fall into. It doesn’t have to be one or the other, but it wasn’t til later that I saw chess or physical sport preparation had things in common.
There’s still the same sort of preparing and seeing what you could’ve done better. Or even just keeping in shape. I get a lot of ideas when I step away from the computer and go exercise for a bit. So it’s nice to have something from both sides.
There’s also the matter of how passing knowledge/skills on helps remind you of basics you forgot or questions you put aside years ago and can answer a bit better now.
Anyway, don’t want to hijack this topic too much! It did help get me thinking about other things.