Tables and text grids.
An idea for the backlog of ideas, hopefully.
Text maps seem to be used by some folks, myself included.
I had completely forgotten about the tables that rpol can make.
I have two ideas, unrelated to each other.
Idea One
The idea here is to make it easier by instead of having large strings of characters, do it something like a list.
An opening tag with a height and width traits.
Then a star tag with a coordinate and the content.
That way, you can get a full grid while only filling in the pieces that will be on the grid.
Much easier to sort out where each character is than having a 30 char string next to a 10 char string.
I.E.
( ( ([pink]E[/pink]( (
([red]m[/red]([aqua]F[/aqua]([blue]g[/blue]( (
Is F under or right of E? Or is it left?
I am not sure, but I figure the list tag code could be a good base to start with.
Just that alone would be awesome help. Playing chess, quote the map, find my piece, change the coordinates and post. Much easier when it looks something like this during editing,
[map h=8 w=8]
[* @=H5][red]K[/red]
[* @ = C3][blue]Q[/blue]
[/map]
But once that is done, a lot of extras could help make it even better, such as,
[* type=line start = G9 end = K9] [red]#[/red]
to fill a line with #
Rooms and even dungeons could be done this way. Not as good as an image, but certainly much smaller memory footprint, easily editable and clear, a bit tedious for doing a whole dungeon, but still doable.
Also, would be real neat if you could tag a cell as having that reverse color effect that some folks get for their posts (the one where the background of the post gets the background color normally used for the background of the name and tagline)
Idea One
Then I realized that those tables only do squares.
So I had the idea of making hex ones, whether via plain text like current easy tables, or via table tags like the above suggestion.
So what do others think of this idea?