Personally I prefer it when the mud has built-in maps that you can call on with the command MAP. One of the muds I play on, 4 Dimensions,  has this feature, and it's really helpful.

The maps you get are particularly large and detailed when the zone is a 'wilderness grid', where you get an 11x11 room map, with yourself in the centre. But the ordinary zones generate maps too, although you can only look 2 rooms in each direction in those.

They also have lots of maps on their website. These look like 'real' maps, very pretty and accurate, even though I hear they are made with just the simple tool Paint.

Here's a link to a mapper that is posted in Lusternia's forums. Seems pretty nice.

We did, and found people are wild about it. It's actually in as a trainable skill.

Aegora -- (sorry for the delay in replying, ack) but yeah, i just put a hyphen ( -) through one of the squares to show e/w exits, and use the pipe key ( | ) or whatever you call that, for n/s, and a bracket ( [ ) for u/d. It doesn't LOOK as hella cool as either a Paint map or that *really* amazing example from Iron Realms, but I love Excel b/c I can put comments in for funky syntax. And, to give credit where it's due, I didn't come up w/ that technique, my accountant husband did. :> Go figure.

It seems like the most common method of creating maps is simple paper and pencil ( and eraser! ) , which might later be transferred to a more funky digital medium.

I still wonder though, how people incorporate mapping into their playing style. Is it a case of playing out an area and then getting the map down on paper as the mental map begins to fade? Do people go on "exploration runs"? Or is it more common for players to map as they play normally?


Nearly'

Re: Mapping Techniques
 

Hey Hugh! (Couldn't resists the alliteration...)

Mapping is an interesting and vital mud topic indeed. First what I did on the first mud I played (GateWay) was to map it all out on graph paper. Automapping was then ('92) at best a far off fantasy. There's never been any need to digitize it as the graph paper and perhaps my neat nature make them look great as is. Anyways multiple windows were also a far off nightmare back in those good old days so a separate paper is much better.

Now as to how to incorporate it into play. Super question and one I've considered myself. As best as I can recall my method was to initially flounder about as a newbie, sometimes dragged along by more experienced players, until I felt the need to actually turn the mental map into a physical one. That is what I did on GateWay. On Allandria, RockyMUD and Might and Magic however I never turned my mental maps into paper ones. In spite of which I could still find my way around RockyMUD now. I think that is due to the way areas were set up though. GateWay has a full 3-D landscape that simply is impossible to keep in one's head thus forcing me to graph it out while Rocky had more of a tree system. One road out each gate and side roads branching off to each area. Very easy to memorize since you're always either following a path/chain of rooms with the occasional fork. MUME on the other hand also has a full 3-D landscape (Middle Earth) but I have not mapped it due to the nature of play there. Mobiles that hunt and worse still areas where PK is likely make it close to impossible to find the calm and time to actually map as one explores.

One piece of advice I think I can pass on though is that generally you should explore a area first without mapping it. You need to get a feel for it and you also may need to watch out for traps and aggressive monsters (or in some cases players). Furthermore you also need to have a rough idea of how large area is so you can allocate sufficient space on the paper for it. Sometimes too areas are not very graph friendly because rooms might overlap if you leave no spaces between rooms. Best to find out in advance if you can (as usual) save space and put all rooms adjacent or if you are going to be forced to double space them.

That said... once your character is high level you can map as you go I find. (Oh look something started chewing on my leg while I was drawing in this room... how cute... Whack! ;-> )