I started playing play-by-mail games seriously in the early nineties. One of the the first ones that I was introduced to was Quest by KJC games. I very quickly discovered that after several turns it became increasing difficult and time consuming searching through old turns to find the correct map showing the area that I wanted to revisit. The first solution that I thought of was photocopying the map and sticking the pieces together to form a larger version but when that turned out to be awkward I realised that I could attempt to write a computer program that would do the job. At the same time a friend of mine was playing the same game and had decided to form a game alliance. He wanted to provide the alliance members with some benefits in order to entice people to join, one of which was to provide maps of any areas that we knew about and in return gather more mapping information. So I tried to tailor the computer program that I was creating for this function. I started by creating a small IFF (Interchange File Format) picture file of the game world and then colour coding each pixel of the picture depending on the terrain found there. The actual mapping program was created in AMOS on my Amiga 500 and was just a simple program that would read the picture file that I had created in a paint program and would display the region around given coordinates on screen or create further IFF files for printing. It was a basic program that only did what I needed it to and wasn't user friendly at all but served it's purpose for the time that I played the game.
After a while I joined a second game, also by KJC, called Monster Island. This was a game that also relied heavily on a map and although the main idea was to move generally Eastwards (towards the other side of the island) it was sometimes necessary to backtrack to areas of the island that had been discovered previously or even pass the information onto others if they were looking for something in particular. So once again I decided to create a mapping program. The game was sufficiently different to Quest to warrant me creating a brand new program rather than just re-doing the Quest one. At first I thought about doing it in the same way, creating a small picture file of known locations and then transferring this into the program. But, after finding that I needed more colours in the picture file (for different terrain types and buildings) than the Amiga could comfortable display, I decided to completely change the format of the program. The changed design also meant that I could store other information such as what kinds of plantlife was prevalent in certain squares or what creatures had been seen. I again used AMOS on an Amiga, this time I created a program in which you could specify which terrain type was in a particular square and could type a small description in. The map could be scrolled around using the cursor keys and moving the mouse over a square would show it's description.
I then started The Keys of Medokh run by Phildee games. At this time I had started learning C so it was only natural that the next mapping program I made would be in this language. It was still tailored for an Amiga computer using Workbench 3 but now featured scroll bars, an auto saving routine and, as in the game, was based on hexagonal tiles rather than squares. All three of those programs were finished some time ago but as always with my early programs I only created them for myself (and one friend that also played) so I kept the user-friendliness and sometimes usefulness to a minimum - I only programmed what I needed and no more. Now that I have started playing Dungeon World and Broken Lands it was only a matter of time before creating another mapping program. But this time, since I have my own website and more experience of what might be useful to other players, I have decided to create one that can be accessed by anybody who wants it.
I have started to program it on my PC using Borland's Delphi version 2. It is still in it's infancy at the moment but working maps can be created and saved. The main form can be displayed in any one of three resolutions 640 x 480, 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768 each one displaying more of the map area than the previous. Moving the mouse over a tile will bring up a note about what the tile type is plus any adjustments to visibility, attack or defense. Clicking on a tile will allow you to choose any of the (known) terrain types. Since I don't know how big the game maps actually are I've had to choose an arbitrary 999 x 999 square area. When you load the program it automatically displays the centre of the map so that you can input what you have already seen without fear of running out of space. I do intend to write a section of code to allow the user to re-centre the map on any square if they find that they are running too close to any edge. Since no absolute co-ordinate system is given in the game it may be hard joining two maps together but I intend to write code that will do that. I have put a version of the program here for download but please be aware that this is not a finished version although the maps that it produces will be usable by all future versions of the program unless it's shown that the mapping area needs to be bigger to contain a complete level of the dungeon, but in that case I will write a conversion program to enable users to keep using existing files.