Most of you are at least somewhat familiar with the mapping tool Trizbort, created by Genstein. Back in 2013, on this thread (http://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=7473) he announced his decision to opensource the code. Then in March 2014, on the same thread, forum user wertle, made some updates (which turned out to be pretty useful) and fixed a few bugs. Then nothing, there seemed to be little movement on new development. This last December, I asked my writing group if they felt there would be interest in making some updates. I received some great encouragement and Andrew Schultz (aschultz) specifically stepped up with some great ideas and feature requests. So work began.
Today I’m announcing a new beta release. I incorporated a few other branches that were made (including those from wertle) and many suggestions from Andrew, who became the primary tester. Main new features include:
Copy and paste (from wertle’s branch)
Fix for large maps (from wertle’s branch)
Support for Regions - You can specify room colors in any case, but regions make it easy and allow you to group rooms together.
SmartSave - quick shortcut to save PDF & default image type to base directory.
Join room - shortcut to join two selected rooms based on position on map.
Many updates and fixes in the export of code (regions only supported in I7 export)
UI enhancements - Beginning to add context menus, tooltips on rooms, improvements on keyboard functionality and shortcuts
Simply unzip the file to a folder and run the executable (make sure all files included in the zip file are in the executable’s folder).
Andrew and I are making plans for more features and improvements so please if you have ideas let us know. You can also check out our bug / feature tracking at http://lautzofif.myjetbrains.com
Andrew is currently working on updating the documentation (with the blessing of Genstein) and he has put up a draft at https://www.dropbox.com/s/x85lk5dpkie7d … shtml?dl=0 and is of course open to suggestions to improve the documentation (still working on getting images updated).
Thanks for the update! Played with this a little today, and it looks really nice! I like the region coloring and the quick saving especially.
In future versions, would it be possible to be able to click and drag to select several rooms and once (and then apply region settings to them)? I think that’d be pretty convenient.
Also, if anyone reading this thread wants to throw in some pre-made maps to play around with, here are some I made for Last Days of Doom and Return to Doom by Peter Killworth!
Thanks for the feedback! I will add that to our list if it’s not already on there. Appreciate the maps also, as it’s always handy to have other maps (and from real games) to test with.
I was able to. Or at least, I was able to with my own files, where I click on empty space, move down and right, and highlight a bunch of rooms. What are you (not) seeing?
It is awesome to see someone using the new version of Trizbort so soon after it came out. While I’ve hit it with some monster maps, it’s good to see even more test case. Plus every trizbort map is encouragement to me to try more games I didn’t get around to.
Huh, ok, after reading that, I went back and tried again. You’re right, it worked. Visually, though, I wouldn’t say I was given any clue the highlighting had been successful. Maybe it’s a problem if you’re not zoomed up close?
Yeah, if you don’t know what to look for, it’s tricky. I didn’t notice it at first, but I got used to it and brushed it aside later.
If the rooms themselves were highlighted somehow, that could be useful/revealing. I don’t know what works in this case. For instance, inverting the RGB color values looks good, but that means grey rooms won’t be changed. I don’t know if shifting the values 128 each works, either.
Maybe Trizbort could change the styles of highlighted rooms to have thicker boundaries? There is usually enough space between each room that there wouldn’t be heinous overlaps.
No you guys are right, I forget which of my changes actually caused this , but the style showing the selected items changed. It is difficult to tell what is selected, unless you pay attention to the mini-map which shows them better. That is something I’ve been thinking about how best to change (and the easiest to code it given some technical details on how the drawing and coloring of rooms is currently implemented)… but I feel this is probably going to be a point of confusion for many users, so I’ll have to address it.
Just released another update that fixes a few bugs and adds some new features. Zip file with executables are at http://bit.ly/trizbortjl
The main focus of this version was bug fixes, which I knocked out quite a few. I also tried to focus on making the app a bit more user friendly for keyboard users. Check out the included revisions.txt (in the download) for a full list of changed items
As always, send bugs or suggestions to me personally or post them here for discussion. Still have a list of things to do, so more work coming. And if you feel so inclined, the source is hosted on GitHub at http://bit.ly/TrizbortSource
Maybe this would require too much work, but I was thinking it’d be cool if maps could be multiple pages to give map-makers the ability to, say, give floors of a building their own page.
EDIT: Ok, I see this feature request is already in the issue tracker. Whoops!
This is one that I’ve been kicking around in the back of my head for awhile. I keep coming back to creating a layering system where the user can create multiple layers, this could be used for different floors for example, but probably has lot of other uses…then when sending to PDF or image, the option would be given to put all layers together or have them on separate pages.
It’s not a small task, but I can see where this would be pretty useful.
Yeah, it’d be neat, though right now there’s a workaround with a third party app that allows you to combine PDFs. Also, you can just juggle the latest few files in “recent files,” so while it’s not perfect, you can collate with the 3rd party app after SmartSaving.
This bumped the feature down in priority for me, since it’s not too painful for me to work around–but often I don’t figure a workaround til after I write a feature request.
Another update is out there this evening, which can be found at the normal link http://bit.ly/trizbortjl
Version 1.5.8.5 focused on adding a few features and fixing up a few bugs that have been around for quite a while. Look at the revisions.txt in the download file for a complete list.
Features include:
++ quickly inserting a room between two other connected rooms (just select a connection between two rooms and hit R to add one in between)
++ can now resize multiple selected rooms at once with the keyboard. (Alt+Ctrl+[Arrow Keys])
++ The smart save is a bit more customizable as to what is actually saved. Look in the App Settings.
++ In/Out and Up/Down now correctly exports to proper source code (this should work in all 3 supported languages)
++ You can now add subtitles to rooms (open up room properties)
++ Added a zoom level textbox in the status bar, to more finely control the zoom level.
++ White can now properly be chosen as a custom room color (open up room properties and go to the color tab)
++ Added additional 2nd fill color styles. They are slightly redundant, but seems more complete now.
++ continued improvement to the user experience for keyboard users.
Bug fixes include (just highlighting some of the bigger ones):
– Fixed F11 crash when automapping was turned off.
– fixed exception during copy/paste of multiple rooms and connections.
– fixed some color display issues on selected rooms with object text inside the room.
– fixed display error when adding rooms that were none standard in size.
As always, send bugs or suggestions to me personally or post them here for discussion. You can also find the latest bug / feature list at https://trello.com/b/avZe0VPG/trizbort
The trizbort source just merged it, and hopefully I’ll be able to keep things up to date. Anyone who wants to report issues may. I’d be glad if people saved me the time. There are actually a few known ones, but anyone who reports them independently will definitely motivate me to fix them. Anything big or small is welcome.
The other nice thing included in this release is the documentation, thanks to Andrew Schultz who has been working hard on keeping the docs up to date with the changes we’ve been making (and testing the interim releases and coming up with new feature suggestions)
Please check it out on github and offer up some suggestions and let us know if you find any issues.
Another update has been released. 1.5.8.8 is out with the following new features:
Export code (I7, I6, and TADS) to clipboard.
‘W’ key to swap objects in two selected rooms.
Ability to start processing from the end of a transcript (@matthiaswatkins)
Automap can now process multiword special commands to provide better flexibility to prevent keyword collisions between certain games. (@matthiaswatkins)
General cleanup and speed improvements in the automapping (@matthiaswatkins)
sample folder contain maps of real games (created by @andrewschultz)