IF Map Editor v0.1

Copyright 1996 Matthew Crosby (crosby@cs.colorado.edu)

This is free software that may be redistributed and/or modified under
the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation.  You should have recieved a copy of this license, if
not, it may be obtained by ftp from prep.ai.mit.edu.   (see license.txt)

This program is a beta.  Please send bug reports, ideas for the
future or any feedback whatsoever to crosby@cs.colorado.edu.
More information about this program may be found on
http://ugrad-www.cs.colorado.edu/~crosby/ifmap/IFMap.html

This program is a map editor for IF games.  I have tried to stick fairly
close to Infocoms format.  Some sample maps and postscript output may
be found in the maps directory in the release package.

This program is written in Tk/Tcl using Tk 4.0, however it _should_ be
compatible with 3.6.  Specifically, it requires wish.  If you don't have
wish, Tc/Tcl may be obtained from ftp://ftp.smli.com/pub/tcl

To install this program, simply edit the line at the top of 'ifmap',
changing the location of wish to reflect its location on your system.
You can then put the 'ifmap' wherever you desire--everything is self
contained within the 'ifmap' script.  You may also want to install the
man page somewhere.

This should be very portable, i'd be very interested in any problems
anyone has running it.  It was developed on an HP 735 running HP-UX, but
I've tested it on a couple of other Unix platforms.  It should run just
fine on non Unix platforms, with the exception of printing (printing to
a file should still work).


Ideas for the future:

Eventually, I want to expand this to create a graphical IF creation tool.
A sort of 'Visual inform and tads'.  As it stands, it is actually pretty
far along; it should be relatively trivial to write a converter from
the save format for this program to any language.  (The format is pretty
self explanatory if anyone wants to go for it).

I also want to ditch Tcl.  It was never designed for this level of
project, and it shows.  This started out as a prototype, however I ended
up putting most of the functionality I wanted into it.  But it does
really need to be rewritten.  I also need to clean the code up a _lot_.

Some of the shorter term ideas for 0.2 include: 
-More entries for room info
 (so you can annotate things more)
-Less sensativity
 (right now, it requires a lot of agility of the mouse)
-optional grid
 (to make it easier to line things up)
-selecting multiple objects
 (so you can move whole things)
-Multiple maps
 (so you can, eg, have the zork1 forest, maze and dungeon maps all in
 one file)
-Undo. obvious.  -A nicer file box.  I'm not all that thrilled with the
 one I have.  -HTML help.  I've actually done this, just didn't get around
 to interfacing it in.

I'd definately be interested in any requests that anyone has.

Finally, i'd be interested in recieving maps anyone creates for
adventures.  I'd like to build a large library of maps up.  I envision a
maps secition of ftp.gmd.de in the future, to go with the walkthroughs.
This program really does make things a lot easier, I was able to create
the map of Zork 1 in about 30 minutes, for instance, from my hand
drawn maps.

Enjoy.