Mapcraft / News: Recent posts

Minor update to fix some issues with running against JDK 1.5, due to using an old version of the XPath parser. Also includes latest images.

Whilst fixing this issue, discovered that all the PNG images had been corrupted in the move from CVS to subversion, so I've had to re-create them all (fortunately, I still had the CVS versions).

Finally, the official webpage has been moved to http://mapcraft.glendale.org.uk, which is a wiki and therefore more likely to get updated.

I've now added my Traveller based world generation tools as a sub project. These originally used the Mapcraft code base for generating planet maps, though they now have their own separate map generation tools.

There are three sides to the application: Generating large number of random star systems for use in Traveller, to a great level of detail (information on all the major planets and moons in a star system is included); creating a unique map for every world in the universe; displaying this information via a web interface.... read more

The existing codebase is being moved to subversion. When this move has been completed, then a new sub-project will be uploaded which manages the automatic creation of world maps.

The code in CVS now compiles again. Not everything works yet, but maps can be loaded and to some extent edited. Types have been tightened up a lot, which should make it easier to maintain. Also got rid of a lot of the layers - the Map class now just allows access to the ITileSet rather than providing a whole load of getters and setters of its own. Reduces code, which is again easier to maintain.

Once everything is working, it'll be possible to start thinking about writing a database implementation of the ITileSet interface. The idea here is to allow for very large maps (at least thousands of tiles across).... read more

An ebuild is now available for Gentoo Linux for version 0.3. It has not been pushed out yet to the standard portage tree, but can be downloaded and placed into local portage, then installed using "emerge mapcraft".

I have just begun a refactoring of some of the low level code. The idea is to specify the data structures as interfaces, in order to allow more than one implementation. The basic implementation is currently being re-written to use the new interface (and the top level code needs to be re-written as well) and to be more efficient.

There is a general plan to provide support for storing map data in a database, in order to allow for very large maps.... read more

Currently in CVS is code for generating random world maps. These maps are meant for use with Celestia - http://celestia.sourceforge.net - as planetary textures. This code is currently in a very early stage of development, but can generate basic rock worlds, simple Earth-like worlds and very simple gas giants.

Version 0.3 has been released, which should make it easier to get running. Needs Ant 1.6 for building it, and JRE 1.4 for running. Both compiled classes are sources are available in the release tarball.

The dependency on the Xalan libraries has been removed, instead it now uses the XML libraries which are part of JDK 1.4. Some changes have been made to improve compatibility with various versions of JDK 1.4. This should fix the problems some people have had getting it to work due to the Xalan dependence.

A release with these changes in will be made soon, until then the latest version is in CVS.

A pre-release set of files for 0.3 has now been uploaded. These should (hopefully) behave better in various environments. A small amount of extra functionality has also been included, including:

Some graphics for towns.
Status bar.
Editing of map areas.
Merge dialog (incomplete).

I'm moving house at the end of the week, and won't have any net access until Broadband has been installed, which may take a couple of weeks. This release is being done now since I won't have time to do anything for a while.

The related project Yagsbook, which embeds Mapcraft maps into web pages, is now also hosted at SourceForge.

http://yagsbook.sourceforge.net/

Areas can now be added, modified and deleted from the GUI (rather than having to hack the XML, which wasn't nice). Also fixed a bug which meant the area applied by the brush wasn't always the correct area. These changes pave the way for the real work of being able to merge maps together from the GUI.

As part of this, a new status bar has been added to the bottom of the window, which shows the current terrain and area of the tile under the mouse pointer.... read more

The code has now been imported into the SourceForge CVS repository. It should be possible to download and build the application now.