Okay... after quite a while, I've developed out my website sufficiently enough that I think it's safe to tell everyone it exists! I'm proud to announce my brand-new maps repository, which you can visit here. The whole website is very much under development, but here's some of the things you can do now, and can look forward to...

Current:
- Rooms colour-coded by environment
- Area names in the map header linked to the adjacent map pages
- Kept up to date (please poke me via any means for requests/corrections)

Future:
- More maps (obviously)
- Options to view the maps without color or without rooms hidden by secret exits
- A Twitter feed for real-time updates
- Integrated Javascript/Ajax, to expose more information about each area (such as hovering over a marked room for details)
- A MUSHclient plugin to download the map and make it visible in a miniwindow
- Custom maps and user accounts
- As a long term goal, I also want to make the website more collaborative, which means at some point anyone will be able to submit a map for review, and others would be able to submit corrections.

Even if you're not all that into maps, I'd really appreciate a look at the site, and any feedback at all (preferably constructive, obviously). Again, the site is achaea.jonathan.com/maps; you can contact me via the forums, in-game messages/tells, or via AIM (it's on my profile). I'll definitely be keeping this site going as long as I can.

Also, huge thanks to Trevize for listening to me for hours on end... and he did the layout, too. (Several iterations of it in fact)

EDIT: wrong URL

Great job!

Thanks!

Also, if you click on the links in the map headers, you might get hit with an error. I'm working on that, it just means that map hasn't been made yet. Like I said... still under development, excuse my dust.

Jonathan, eh? I assumed you were more of a Johanna or Julie.

Lolno. Very funny

Nice maps!

That's just Danith's way of flirting, don't mind him.
Good job on the maps! ^__^

Great Job. You should see if you can host the maps Asara made for when her site goes down.

looking good!

and yes, good idea what Berenene suggested.

I don't know if anyone else sees it this way, but I i find the ASCII layout of it quite appealing.

The main reasons I went with pure-text maps were (a) because I had already written quite a few of them that way over the years and I know the ins and outs of ASCII maps, (b) they're easier for me to write out with code, and (c) I can easily apply CSS, Javascript, and plain-old HTML links and alt-text to any part of the map. The text maps may look like a pile of gibberish at first, but they follow very simple rules and are easy to understand once you grasp them. That's a fairly major point when it comes to the collaborative aspect I want to build: text maps should be easy to write on your own (well, unless you try mapping the Western Ithmia from scratch).

Have fun with the Northreach.

Pssh, I did that one already.

I just lost it in a hard drive crash

Lovely job, truly.

I couldn't love it more, unless perhaps, it was in alphabetical order.

Uh... ...actually it is in alphabetical order. It's just that most of the maps start with "the"... if you look, though, everything after "The" is still ordered alphabetically. That's on the list though!

How about alphabetical in regards to the common name?

... good point. Thanks!

EDIT: The problem is that the list is dynamically generated from the maps in the database. I'm still working on a lot related to the names/shortnames, so... that particular aspect will likely change a bit.

And he's working on it again!

Such a masochist.

Good gods this one is hard.

The Northreach makes me curl up in the fetal position.

I have it pretty much all mapped out, the problem is getting certain connections to line up. They just don't want to behave.

The obvious solution is to scale it up to a 1000x1000 map.

Obviously. But then it wouldn't fit on the web page.

I'm still hoping for something like Shazara's huge map of Achaea. It was great for getting a good sense of where something was in relation to something else (and having the roads on it was cool).

You mean like Delph's map, but including rooms?

Wow. That would be... huge. There's one for Lusternia, which has nowhere -near- as many rooms for Achaea, and my computer wants to kill me every time I load it.

Right-click, save as file, open it in something that can handle large images like Gimp. That's what I do with Delph's. MS Paint (which is evil anyways) hates any decently large images.

I have to get used to the black background (it's so black!), but I love the coloured and symboled rooms!

Get used to it? Doesn't your client have an uhm, black background?

Map

I'm used to Asara's maps with white backgrounds.

If it makes you feel better, the maps are CSS-driven. I could -very- easily define a new color key for viewing in white. Some colors just don't show up well on white though... like the yellow denoting 'secret' exits in Asara's maps.

I'll probably be making a white-based map key at some point anyways, for easy-to-print, less-ink-used printed maps. If anyone wants to design a color key themselves (using RGB hex notation #RRGGBB), it'll probably get done faster.

Briefly mentioning that I have a very, very simplistic news section up on the site now. A small change you'll want to be aware of, if you actually use my maps - be honest, there aren't many and Asara's are still the best around - is that previously, 'achaea.jonathan.com' redirected straight to the /maps directory. This is no longer so. It's only one click in the menubar, or five more keystrokes, or an updated bookmark, but there you go.