Talek says, "Marlek Has a mapping system to talk about, so here he is."

Talek goes down the few steps to the seating area.

Talek comes down the few steps from the stage.

Marlek clears his throat, "Well I guess since xxa didn't show I'll mention my mapping system briefly ;)"

Talek says, "Oh, and Juliann has asked my to mention that people should check out www.blaxxun.com."

Talek says, "Sorry, it's yours, Marlek"

Marlek says, "I'm writing a mapping system for my MUX that'll print a 25x25 ASCII/ANSI map of an area surrounding a vehicle you're in, loaded from a .bmp file."

Marlek says, "Right now it only supports 1-bit (2 color) bitmaps, but I'll eventually support up to 8-bit (*maybe* 24-bit, but that's bordering on horrible filesizes)"

Marlek says, "1-bit works well when you just have two features on the map to worry about: land and sea."

Marlek says, "More colors would add elevations to worry about, for things like planes."

Marlek says, "Can't think of anything else, so I'll jump into questions ;)"

Chris raises his hand

Talek says, "Oops, I forgot to clear the question queue. Next. :-)"

Chris says, "Wouldnt the ammount of colors in the bitmap be limited by the MUSH supported ansi() colors?"

Marlek says, "Well, maps displayed to players don't have to necessarily correlate to colors... you can have special characters representing the different elements on the map."

Chris says, "ahh. ok."

Marlek says, "And right now I haven't yet decided how to handle display of elevations to people who can't use colors. ;)"

Marlek says, "Bitmaps are nice as they are easy to generate in your favorite graphics editing program."

Marlek says, "I took maps off of Xerox Parc's map server for my MUX."

Marlek forgot about the question queue ;)

Talek says, "Okay, One last question then: have you considered hooking this up to DSpace?"

Marlek says, "I'm writing this with a "sea space system", which I'll be releasing when I'm done testing."

Marlek says, "http://www.nmt.edu/~altailji/seaspace/ for more info on that."

Talek carefully walks up the narrow stairs to the stage.

Marlek goes down the few steps to the seating area.

Marlek comes down the few steps from the stage.

Talek says, "Okay. Thanks, Marlek, for filling in."

Marlek wipes some sweat off of his forehead, "No problem ;)"