Overview

Trizbort is a simple tool which can be used to create maps for interactive fiction.

Over the years a number of styles have evolved for interactive fiction mapping. Trizbort focuses on creating maps in only one of these styles, as popularised by Infocom: labelled boxes for rooms, with lines connecting them.

Whether you're playing or writing interactive fiction, mapping can be invaluable. Trizbort is just one of many mapping tools for interactive fiction: I hope you find it useful, but you may want to check out the others too.

Features include:

• A simple point and click interface to create rooms, resize them and connect them together;
• Smart* lines which snap to the cardinal** points on room edges;
• Rooms can be marked as dark or light; dark rooms on the map have shaded corners;
• A list of objects per room, which can be "docked" to any room edge or placed inside the room;
• Customisable colours, fonts and drawing styles;
• A "hand-drawn" line style for that back-of-an-envelope feel;
• Title, description and author text which will be saved with the map;
• Export to PDF files and PNG images for posterity or printing;
• Multiple selection;
• Single keypress keyboard shortcuts;
• An XML file format in case other tools wish to generate or read Trizbort maps.

* Not that smart.
** More or less cardinal. In fact Trizbort adds some decidedly non-cardinal points to make things easier.

Latest News

March 13th, 2011

Version 1.2 has been released. This is a major update to Trizbort. The full release notes are online, but most significantly:

• A complete user guide to Trizbort is now online.
• Trizbort now supports automapping from game transcripts.
• You can now export your maps to Inform 7, TADS and Inform 6.
• No more modes! You can now draw connections whenever nothing is selected, and you can always select things.
• A "minimap" gives you an overview of your whole map, and you can click and drag it to scroll around.
• Scroll bars finally make an appearance on the canvas, and the cursor keys now work too.
• The File menu sports a list of recently used maps, and your most recent save/export folders are remembered.

February 18th, 2011

Version 1.1 has been released. The full release notes are online, but most significantly:

• Trizbort now supports selecting multiple rooms and connections at the same time and many operations now work on such selections.
• New keyboard shortcuts and menu options make it easier to change connection (line) styles.
• The installer also adds a "Trizbort Map File" template to Windows Explorer so you can create new maps and then double click them to open Trizbort.
• Drawing optimizations should also mean that large maps will display a little faster.

October 12th, 2010

Version 1.0.1 has been released, fixing a bug reported by several people which could cause Trizbort to use 100% CPU time even when idle. Trizbort tries quite enthusiastically to update its menu and toolbars to make sure everything is checked or greyed out as appropriate, and it was getting a little over zealous to say the least.