That’s, huh, absolutely wonderful! Exactly what I need.
What you miss is:
Create custom map size (you prompt for size, and you put numbers down both x/y axis to help finding things)
Create custom map tile size (so that you aren’t stuck to 16 pixel like in that case)
Add numbers-notes
Add lines and arrows
Edit single tile/import tileset/import map
Make a selection and then hold and drag it around to reposition an area
Snap to various points of the grid (center of tile, corners, margins)
So essentially you prompt for the size of the new map in size and tile size.
With those options it would be not just a functional editor, but it would be actually absolutely COMPLETE.
Oh, and you should tweak the way it starts up: in order to start mapping, with this tileset, I’d probably need a whole black map and then a white tile so that I can start carve my way. And a black grid for best results ;)
A last quibble would be that the grid isn’t counted in the tile size. This is quite a tricky problem, but you see it when you align some tiles and they get double borders (since these tiles use a black outline).
Perhaps it would be helpful to know for what purpose you needed this app? Are you running a tabletop campaign, and you need to be able to pull dungeons out of your back-pocket at a moment’s notice?
I’ve spent HOURS on DosBox emulating the Roland MT-32, make Might and Magic World of Xeen CD version perfect, make Wizardry 7 work, play a bit with Daggerfall, configure WinUAE with WHLoad to emulate perfectly the Amiga and all those great RPGs we had at the time (not old like Ultima 7, I mean OLD, like Bard’s Tale).
While most of the “new” games like Might & Magic have automapping, I intend to play some Amiga classics like Black Crypt or Captive that seriously need to be mapped. So I wanted a decent tool.
My main objective is to play Amberstar/Ambermoon, and those shouldn’t need maps, but I’m also going to play other classics :)
Ah, I see. Half the fun of those old games, for me, was working graph paper and pencil and writing up my own maps as I explored. I couldn’t have been more at home if the deluxe version of the game shipped with a ten foot pole and a lantern.
In my case, I’m interested in this tool that you’re requesting because I gathered a few friends for a session of AD&D first edition last month, and we decided to make it a regular thing. Something like this could come in handy.
Thanks for the feedback. I just added saving and loading capability and am going to hit annotations next. Resizing the grid shouldn’t be too much of an issue, and I like the idea of area selection and dragging, I think I should be able to do something along those lines.
I’m gonna keep working on this because I remember now how much I enjoyed messing around with Javascript.
fakeedit: I just added a “Fill with Black” button that will fill the entire map with black so that you can erase away what you don’t want.
At the risk of nitpicking, ideally the black outline around a tile shouldn’t exist (but this is an issue no matter what titleset you use). It’s like the single tile has white margin and is 15x15 instead of 16x16. In truth it’s like 15+1, where the +1 is because you have a black grid of 1 pixel everywhere.
So, the tile should be placed at the center, but the GRID should be like a topmost layer.
You’d have: 15 pixels of a tile + 1 pixel of grid + another 15 pixels of a tile
I’m not sure how easy is to code this grid-like placement that “shifts” each block by 1 pixel because the grid itself should be counted. But it SHOULD be counted. It’s kind of tricky.
I’ve been working on this mapping utility in my spare time, which has been pretty spare in the last few weeks. I revamped the UI and made the default map size 100x100.
I added an opacity slider for this purpose.
This should be working properly now.
Still don’t have the annotation layer yet, but that is totally next.
Great work so far. On the one hand it shows your awesome skills, and on the other it shows how lacking other tools are, since you’d think these features would be more or less universally available, yet the only tools I’ve seen that do more or less the same thing are considerably less usable.
Let me suggest yet more features for the queue:
Add a key to png. That is, put an index showing the glyphs and their tooltips somewhere on the image itself, with a tool. Bonus points for just using the glyphs which were actually used in that map.
Draw and erase rectangles of glyphs.
And if you really get bored, do the same thing on a hexmap.
A couple of things: “fill with black” kind of needs that you add an “all white” icon, to paint rooms that way. SELF-EDIT: Nope, I guess one can just use the “erase” tool.
It’s all quite perfect. There only two other things that can be useful are about selecting-dragging an area to reposition it, and add notes. The other thing is that in a map sometimes more than one icon is used on the same tile. Say there’s a door AND a switch on the wall. It’s a minor issue but ideally one should be able to “layer” the tiles instead of just overwriting them in a spot.
(I’m also wondering if you deal with a dungeon where a door is between one square and the other, since the tileset here implies that a door is always in the middle of the square, but it’s simply a tileset issue and not an editor one)
