|
With hindsight, it makes sense that people who enjoy playing text based games would also enjoy a pen and paper approach to mapping them. I think that Jason makes a great point - you can take real pride in a "hand crafted" map, and I suppose it adds to the experience of exploration.
In my experience the mapping facilities of MUD clients are often fiddly, and there is inevitably some awkward procedure for performing unsual edits that are quickly and simply implemented using a pencil and eraser! I suppose that if you learned the quirks of one particular "mapper" little intervention would be needed for the automatic generation of maps, but personally I'd rather be able to traipse about the MUD without worrying about things like "if I go down these stairs, what point am I on in the level below?". If only someone could write a mapper with an "autofudge" facility...
I have written a simple PERL script to convert "n, 2 w, s" style paths to ASCII HTML maps, with hyperlinks to move up/down levels, but it seems like the more I look at it, the more complicated it is to cover all the "corner cases" and force an inherently random navigation system onto a grid. Upon reflection, maybe it's better that way - surely it's more interesting to play areas with tunnels, pits, scalable walls, magic portals and other navigational chicanery than to trudge around a simple grid...
I guess I'll stick to the time honoured pen and paper approach...
Thanks for the opinions and advice!
Nearly'
|