How The Depot Was Made
I use Hot Dog Pro (version 1.32, to be exact) for almost all of my HTML work. I recomend it highly. The 2.0 version is excellent and the 32 bit version looks very promising, once they take care of all of the bugs. I have tried a bunch of other editors, and continue to try new ones as they come out, but I have always gone back to Hot Dog Pro...
All of the graphics to date have been done with PC Paintbrush Designer, which can be found for about $10 in many stores. I have tried out a few other shareware programs, but haven't been as happy with them. Eventually, my work will require that I use PhotoShop, and I will start using it for work on The Depot as well.
Most of the questions I get ask me about the maps. If no credit is given for a map, I did the artwork. The first map I did was 1835, based on a scan of map sent to me by Dirk Clemens. It is the worst of the lot, due to time pressures (I was trying to get it ready for a PBEM game which was about to start). I will eventually redo it, but I will probably finish all the others first.
I realize that Matthias Klose has made all of the maps available for FTP in postscript form. GIFs are still universal on the web, so I will continue to provide maps in this form. The colour version is easier for me to plan games from - the black and whites are for printing out. You'll need to set the print out to full page or you'll get a tiny image - neat, but hardly useful...
Some changes to the original maps have occurred. Most of these are due to the limitations of a small file for easy internet transport. Some major changes are: Any hex that can not be built upon is dark grey, if land, and blue, if sea. This is to end confusion with brown/russet hexes (as in 1829) and to limit the number of colours in the file (thus making it smaller). When 1825 advances to the point of a fifth phase, allowing upgrades of grey tiles (something Francis has planned - see the 1825 press release), I will change to another colour. Again, the 1835 map is not in line with this standard. It will be upgraded soon (hopefully).
I use Netscape 3.0 when I am doing my browsing (at least I do at the time I am writing this - My job requires me to keep abreast of browser development, which means I am usually running the newest version of Netscape). I design my sites to take advantage of a lot of Netscape's features. I try to limit this to the version in current circulation (at the time I am writing this, it is Netscape 2.0), but there are times when a new feature is too good to pass up (in 3.0, this is the ability to specify background colors in table cells - this works too well for creating Share Price Indexes to ignore!). I do not currently use any of the Microsoft extensions to HTML, and do not intend to unless they are adopted by Netscape (as in the case of the cell backgrounds) or Internet Explorer gains more of a following. By the way: If you find that something looks particularly hideous in your browser, let me know! I'll try to address it...
Go back to the Stationmaster's office
Go back to the platform.
