Lulu's MUD Cartographer / News: Recent posts

All of the source files are now available for viewing in the CVS repository

Since I've been doing a bunch of work on the app I figured (after my wife made fun of it) that I should update the web page.

All I've updated is the source structure and the color scheme so far, but I'm going to have to update the content as well to account for the two different versions I have now (C# and Java)

0.0.4 - August 31, 2008

- Changed to partial-MVC pattern for notifying interested GUI elements of changes
- Model is updated directly
- Cleaned up the description panel
- Fixed issue with last typed character being lost
- Added focus logic
- Fixed scrolling

- Cleaned up the room painting code; Room class now handles painting itself
- Added choosable text and background colors
- Improved room info editing
- Focus automatically transfers back to the map panel
- Room symbol restricted to one character
- Room symbol auto selects existing symbol on click
- Clicking a letter automatically sets the currently selected room's symbol
- Cleaned out all old debug code

Bunch of updates: info panel, buffered drawing, etc.

I'm rewriting this in Java using Java2D to draw rooms instead of using ascii characters.

Annotations are now loaded from file, special icon window is cleaned up and annotations can be added with the period key.

Lulu's MUD Cartographer is now free software and will stay free software.

Lulu's MUD Cartographer is now copyrighted and released under the GNU General Public License
(http://www.gnu.org/licenses/)

Cleaned up the saving:
- unsaved changes flag (*) working correctly
- no-op keys and key combos handled correctly
Added hot keys:
Ctrl+S to save
Ctrl+A to save as ...
Ctrl+O to open

Note that annotations are not saved, yet.

Added ability to save and open .txt map files. Not polished, but works.

Inserting a room between two rooms now works when the room is within a circular path:

2--3
|...|
1--4

Given this map, inserting between 1 and 2 Produces:

2--3
|...|
5..|
|...|
1--4

Where the spacer is inserted automatically to maintain the spacing between 4 and 3.

I've got the insert code started and I've fixed a few bugs so I figured I'd post the code. I also want folks to see that development has not been abandoned. :) Ctrl+NumKey and Ctrl+ArrowKey and even Ctrl+ArrowKeyCombo should all work now for simple scenarios. Inserting rooms in a map with circular paths (e.g. room 1 attaches to room 2, room 2 attaches to room 3, room 3 attaches back to room 1) will break, but other inserts should work.... read more

I've been working feverishly to get "inserts" to work. An insert is simply creating a room in between two rooms and having the map adjust to accommodate. Consider this example:

1-2
..\.|
...3

What happens to the 1,3 connection when a room is inserted between 1 and 2?

1--4--2
..\.....|
....\...|
......\.|
........3

I should have the code to handle this soon.

- Fixed bugs
- Added default room icon
- Added Alt+<dir> for creating rooms with "connection" icons

Seems I released the wrong file as 0.3.5: I've released it and it should work properly now. My apologies for the confusion.
C>

After creating the webpage for this project and using JPG's for rounded corners I decided to find a way to create rounded corners with HTML. Ultimately I created a program that turns *any* bitmap into an HTML table. Check it out:

http://bitmaptohtml.sourceforge.net

I created a new web page with some colour and better navigation. Sharpened up the old CSS and JavaScript skills.

http://mudcartographer.sourceforge.net

Added Ctrl+c copy to clipboard functionality

Added insert capability to insert a room in front of another room.

Fixed the delete functionality so that if a room gets deleted a reachable room will always get the cursor:
.......
1.3.4.
..|/..
6-2-5.
../|\..
7.8.9.
......
In the above instance, if 2 is deleted then any room but 1 will now be unreachable from the starting point. This brings up the question of what "side" of the map should become unreachable. Consider the following:

1-2-3-4-5-6-7

If I delete room 2, should I keep room 1 or rooms 3 to 7?... read more

Changing the current room unicode symbol ("icon") now shows the symbol for a brief period

When a user cycles the special icons for the current room the icon shows for a brief period before going back to the default cursor.