Zugg Software :: View topic

Newbie Joined: 13 May 2004 Posts: 3 Location: USA

Just curious, really. Though I use (and adore) zMUD, I don't really follow the news. I just happened to read the latest New Year's Announcement letter or whatever it was, and I was curious. So, is zMapper still performing as it was at the turn of the year?

Posted: Fri May 14, 2004 2:33 am

Newbie Joined: 13 May 2004 Posts: 3 Location: USA

Oh! Zugg himself. You do keep tabs, don't you.

Anyway, I was wondering: Wizards of the Coast owns D&D. Have you tried selling it to them? License the core of it to them, and let them put their own D&Dish interface over the top, or something. If you can sell it to them that way, you don't have to do the marketting to the D&D crowd, but you get a piece of every sale they make. You'd just have to get in contact with WotC Corporate and be persistent.

Just a thought.

Posted: Fri May 14, 2004 6:52 pm

Well, that was the direction I was heading with zMapper. It still needs quite a bit of work before WoC would be interested in it. And there was no way I could afford to keep working on it with the current sales. So, as it said in the New Years letter, I'm now spending my time working on an email client (see the ZuggMail forum). Once the email client is done and it's sales is bringing in better income, then I'll be able to afford to work on projects like zMapper again.

Wizards already has some sort of arrangement with the people that make the "Campaign Cartographer" product, so it wouldn't necessarily be trivial to get them to promote or license zMapper.

Newbie Joined: 13 May 2004 Posts: 3 Location: USA

Ah, cool. Very best of luck with the mail program, then. I shall be interested in it when it comes out. I also plan to buy zMapper as soon as I have money. I mentioned I've had zMUD for a while, and I just pulled it out and dusted it off, got the latest upgrade. The upgrades to the mapping system alone are heaven-sent. It's so fast, and so much more robust. The whole database thing is just great. No more hundreds of separate zone files. But the robustness is what really pleases me. My home MUD is gigantic, and I like to put everything that's not special to a particular into the Overview zone so that I can see the geographical relationships of all the areas in the world. Needless to say, the Overview zone gets massive. I broke the old zMUD integrated mapper a couple of times with it, including one odd little area where a portion of the tiles got off the grid just slightly, messing up all the links and everything. Terrible. With the new format, though, try as I might I just can't seem to kill it. And it's more responsive, too, when I'm hauling around huge chunks of a land mass.

In short, I haven't had to divide my overview zone into quadrants. This pleases me greatly. I can't wait to get zMapper and give this bad boy a graphical backdrop.

I was wondering, though: would it be possible to include simple statistical functions, kinda like word/character/paragraph count in a Word Processor? Except this would be room-count (by zone and total), zone count, maybe even link-count, just for kicks. All of it just for kicks, really.

Wanderer Joined: 02 Sep 2005 Posts: 60

Ugh. Well color me not suprised on the poor sales. I should have done a trial on zMapper as well before going ahead and buying the package deal. zMapper is soooooo buggy. =(

I was thinking of using it to jazz up my existing maps in retromud but after fooling with it for a few hours I fear it too much to trust it with my maps. I'm seriously afraid it would corrupt and destroy my mapfiles.

Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 3:50 pm

That's what backups are for. zMapper works fine for most stuff. Yes, there are bugs, but most of them are pretty easy to work around. But yes, I'd never work on a map file without making a backup. But making a backup is pretty trivial, and making regular backups is true of *any* software.