Trizbort, the Interactive Fiction Mapper

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History

January 2015

Trizbort's documentation is now also open source, under the same license, at https://github.com/genstein/trizbort/tree/master/Docs.

Version 1.2.1 - March 2013

Trizbort is now open source under the MIT license. The About box reflects the new license and links to github. The Donate window has been removed: since any contributions to me would not necessarily fund future developments now, it didn't seem fair! You can find the source code at http://github.com/genstein/trizbort.

Version 1.2 - March 2011

New Features

Documentation. An up to date guide explaining how to use Trizbort is available online.

Automapping. Trizbort can now automatically generate maps given a game transcript.

Export to Inform 7, TADS and Inform 6. You can now draft a game map in Trizbort and export it straight to your development system of choice (assuming it's one of these three :)

No More Modes. There's now no such things as "Select" or "Draw Lines" modes. Instead you can draw a line whenever nothing is selected, and you can always select things. You can move rooms and their connections whenever any rooms are selected. You can resize a room or move a connection's end points whenever just that one room or connection is selected. See the documentation for more details as to how this works.

Room Descriptions. Each room can have an associated description. Use this however you like; automapping will do its best to fill it in automatically, and export to an IF development system will use the description if it can.

Minimap. Trizbort now displays a miniature view of the whole map in the top right corner of the canvas, which you can click to scroll around the map.

Scrolling. The canvas now supports scroll bars which can be used to scroll around the map. The cursor keys on the keyboard can now be used as well.

View Entire Map. View->Entire Map or Ctrl+Home will center the whole map onscreen and zoom out until you can see everything.

Select All/Select None. Available from the Edit menu. If nothing is selected, pressing Return will select and center on the room closest to the middle of the view.

MRU list. The File menu now sports a list of the most recently used maps; click one to load the map.

Last used folders are remembered. The last folder from which you loaded/saved a map, or exported each type of file, are remembered.

Changes

A new project setting allows you to set your preferred distance between rooms. Trizbort uses this during automapping whenever it adds already-connected rooms to the map.

When a room is selected, its resize handles are accompanied by a bounding box.

Fixes

Better mouse cursor feedback. The mouse cursor shape now pretty accurately reflects what clicking the mouse will do; previously this was a bit hit and miss.

Handles and ports no longer appear on an arbitrary room or connection when multiple things are selected.

It used to be easy to drag the end point of a new (or existing) line quite close to a room but not quite close enough to dock it to a port on that room. It's now a lot harder, so it should be easier to make connections that stick with rooms as they move.

When dragging out new connections, Trizbort no longer highlights things if dropping the connection onto them won't have any effect.

There may have been some snap to grid issues with the top, bottom, left and right resize handles on rooms, w.r.t not always snapping to the grid in a sensible way when snap to grid is turned on. These should now be fixed.

A few minor UI fixes such as tab ordering and menu item naming.

A few operations did not work correctly with multiple selections, applying themselves only to the first selected item. These now apply to all items.

Operations which do not apply to multiple selections are now disabled when multiple items are selected.

Known Issues

The mouse wheel zoom in/out still appears to be the wrong way round, at least with respect to every other application in the Universe. If this particularly bugs anyone, or if you particularly prefer it, let me know.

Version 1.1 - February 2011

Changes

Directional connections are now called One Way Arrows. Their shortcut is now A rather than I, to make room for new shortcuts.

The shortcut for dotted connections is now T, to make room for new shortcuts.

The shortcut to toggle light/darkness is now K rather than D, to make room for new shortcuts.

Navigation via the numeric keypad will now center on each room visited rather than just ensuring it is visible onscreen. This makes things easier to follow on large maps.

New Features

Multi-select. Drag the left mouse button around multiple rooms and/or connections to select them all at once. Many operations which applied previously to single selections now apply to multiple selections, including movement and deletion. This makes it easier to rearrange maps, make space for new rooms, render whole sections of the map dark, etc.

Hold the Control key while selecting or dragging to add to the current selection without losing it. Hold the shift key whilst selecting or dragging to toggle between selected and deselected. For example, drag select the whole map, hold Shift and drag select any parts you don't want selected, then hold Control and reselect any stragglers who should be selected.

The Edit->Line Styles menu and shortcuts make it easy to change connection styles: quickly switch between plain (P), dotted (T), one way arrow (A) and up/down/in/out (U/D/I/O) connections. Combinations (such as a dotted one way up/down connection) are still permitted. All these options can be applied to multiple selections.

Moving a connection which leads off into space (rather than being entirely anchored between rooms) will now move all free floating end points of the line rather than doing nothing.

The installer will add "Trizbort Map File" to new file menu in Windows (Explorer). A reboot may be required before Windows notices this new option. Advanced users may restart Explorer using the appropriate genuflections instead.

Trizbort will now check for updates when it starts up, and inform you if there is a new version available. You can stop this by checking a box when first informed of a new version; it will then keep quiet until the next new version is released. You can manually check for updates from the Help menu.

Optimisations

Faster drawing. On screen, "hand drawn" lines are drawn as straight lines when zoomed out far enough to make little difference in appearance. In exported PDF and image files the map is still always drawn to the highest possibile quality. The formatting of each piece of text on the map is also now cached until it changes, rather than being recomputed each time the map is drawn.

Known Issues

The mouse wheel zoom in/out appears to be the wrong way round, at least with respect to every other application in the Universe. If this particularly bugs anyone, or if you particularly prefer it, let me know.

Version 1.0.1 - October 2010

Fixes

Fixed an issue whereby on some computers Trizbort would consume 100% CPU time.

New Features

Keyboard navigation. You can now move around the map using the numeric keypad. Numeric keys move a la compass directions when a room is selected; hold Ctrl as well to create new connected rooms.

Version 1.0 - July 2010

The first release of Trizbort.