It's a web-based shareable map with zoom/scroll, where players add locations manually so no access to the server files is required to create a map of the world and share it. Designed to not completely remove the element of exploration from the world.
I made the map system for our SMP server, but now I've put proper instructions for it up on a website, so anyone should be able to use it.
I like the map generator you have made, but it did not work for me no matter what I did. I followed the instructions to put it on google drive. Whenever I use my follow the link, it displays the background with the pigs on the flat world, but it displays an error message that tells me that the file could not be read. I have tried using the map generator locally, on google drive, and even on dropbox with no success. It probably is a fault of mine. I love your map generator and really want to use it, but I am stuck and have no idea.
Hi, you've created a Google Doc file rather than a .txt file.
(Google Docs are in some custom format that's native to Google, like the Google equivalent of Microsoft Word .doc format. They're good for fonts and nice layout, but too difficult for the map generator to extract data from)
Instead, create the .txt file using a text editor like Notepad, and then upload it to Google Drive and use that.
Installing the Google drive application onto your computer can make this easier - it creates a directory on your computer which it keeps synced with Google Drive, so you just edit the file on your computer and it automatically updates the online one.
Other Google tips:
If you're doing it through Google's web interface and find it creating extra files with the same name instead of replacing the old one, right-click on the file (or use the "More" menu). There's a "Manage revisions..." menu item which allows you to upload a new version of the file that takes the place of the old version, instead of creating new files.
Another thing you can do is click on the "Create" button, select "Connect more apps", and add a notepad app - this lets you edit a .txt file from within Google Drive, instead of having to upload it from your computer each time. Though I haven't had much experience with this.
Thank you so much DrFrankenstone! I can run it from Google Drive without any problems now!
I just have one more thing to ask you: how do you run it from your computer without an internet connection. Sometimes, I lose access to the internet and want a way to look at the map without having internet access. I am running a computer with Linux Mint 16 installed if that is important.
To run it without an internet connection, download the zip file and unzip it somewhere on your computer, then doubleclick on index_local.html (i.e. open index_local.html in your preferred browser).
Your browser will bring up the error message about there being no src specified, but the URL box at the top of the browser window should now contain the correct URL to load the map viewer locally on your computer, all you have to do is add ?src=example.txt to the end of that URL and the map will run locally. Similarly with your own location files.
The fonts are loaded from googleapis.com, so with no internet connection the map might fall back to default system fonts - it probably depends how advanced browser resource caching is these days. For what it's worth, the difference between index.html and index_local.html is that index.html tries to load some libraries from googleapis.com instead of local versions - this is faster over an internet connection due to better cache hits, but with no internet connection you'll want to use index_local.html
Btw, you weren't the first to get stuck because of a .doc file instead of a .txt file, in future I hope to detect this and provide a more helpful error message. Later perhaps even add support to google doc files (if I can), since they have such a nice collaboritive online UI for them.
I believe Firefox relaxes that restriction by default.
I have an older Linux Mint box at home, so if it's not Chrome I can give it a try tonight. I suspect it's some kind of browser security feature though, so you could try googling "ajax local file <browser name>"
Yes, it works! Just not from chromium (Chrome). It works perfectly in firefox. I couldn't fix it in Chrome, but it works perfectly in firefox, so I'll just use firefox for local viewing. Thanks so much for all your help!
Making it iframe-able is a good idea and I've just added that to the todo list, however it's been sitting there with oceans nearly finished for a couple of months now - I need a long span of free time to update it, so I'm not sure when an iframe version will happen.
I know what you mean about it still being cramped when fully zoomed in, there are a couple of things you can do about it:
You can set &range=1600 to make it zoom in more, but at the loss of being able to zoom out as far.
You can edit the index.html file yourself to add an extra zoom level. This is a simple change to the file which I'll detail below, but I don't feel I can release it with the extra zoom because ipads and iphones can't zoom beyond 2236 x 2236 size. Also, because the map is pre-rendered at every zoom level, adding an extra zoom level will cause the browser to use a lot of memory and the page to take longer in the "Mining locations..." phase.
I'll post details on how to add a zoom level in the next message.
The number 4050 comes from being 1.5 times the size of 2700 - each zoom level zooms 150%
You'll notice there are 3 blocks of code that look like this, the first two are for devices with small screens, and they probably won't be able to handle a 4050 × 4050 map, so it's up to you what resolution you'd like the 5th zoom level to be for those smaller screen versions. If you expect your map to be used by ipads or iphones then zoom level 5 on the smaller screen sizes should be set to the same size as zoom level 4 - 2236 × 2236
The server I play on keeps the locaton list in a wiki page, as it's an easy way to let everyone edit it, so yeah, keeping it in a CMS should work. It ignores anything in the page that isn't a list or table - and ignores anything in a list/table that it isn't able to parse, so title rows etc are fine.
Any chance you could host an alternative version that is just the map with no background/signs and top text? (so it can be iframed without being really messy unless you grand the iframe bascially 100% of the whole page)
Ideally fluid.
You can set the map area by adjusting the range setting, and you can set where the map is centered by adjusting the x and z.
Settings like map range and coords can be specified in the location-list file, but they can also be overriden by setting them in the URL (help on settings is here), which means you can have a default view for the map as well as links to see far off places.
With links you can cover a huge area. Our server has a spawn platform with a bunch of teleports to different parts of the world, in order to spread the players out a bit. So for the map we have this image of the spawn platform set up with hyperlinks over each teleport, so you can click on any of the teleports and it takes you to a map of that area, all from the same location-list file (which is good because the maps overlap).
(image is just for illustration, it's not hyperlinked - I don't know how to do that in BB-code)
I think I'm a long way off from any of that at this point. After playing around with Amidst, I've found that the maps don't reflect my world. The seed is correct because I plugged it into a single player map and generated the same map I'm playing on in the server I rent.
Thanks for the work you're doing. I think you have a fantastic idea and it will be very helpful when I get the rest of this rolling.
The copy/paste operation to paste the seed into Amidst can sometimes insert an space character at the beginning or end of the seed, and Amidst doesn't strip that out, so check for extra spaces as just having a single space at the end of the seed will completely change the map.
Another possibility is the world type might be different, e.g. set to large biomes in Minecraft but not in Amidst. That can be set in Amidst using Options → World type menu.
If this is in vanilla Minecraft, and none of those solutions helped, I'd be curious to know the seed — I can give it a go in Minecraft and Amidst.
I love this tool, but I seem to be having a problem getting the x and z setting to work. No matter what I do it always seems to be centered on 0, 0. Could you give me an example of exactly how this setting is supposed to work?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is" - Yogi Berra
Explore the demo map (runs better on a computer than a phone)
It's a web-based shareable map with zoom/scroll, where players add locations manually so no access to the server files is required to create a map of the world and share it. Designed to not completely remove the element of exploration from the world.
I made the map system for our SMP server, but now I've put proper instructions for it up on a website, so anyone should be able to use it.
How to make your own.
Because locations can have links, it can also double as a gallery for a server or single player world.
I like the map generator you have made, but it did not work for me no matter what I did. I followed the instructions to put it on google drive. Whenever I use my follow the link, it displays the background with the pigs on the flat world, but it displays an error message that tells me that the file could not be read. I have tried using the map generator locally, on google drive, and even on dropbox with no success. It probably is a fault of mine. I love your map generator and really want to use it, but I am stuck and have no idea.
Here is the URL of the error message:
https://85b5da109cbab0a781619b9c891f667f8ebe60b8.googledrive.com/host/0B35KCzsTLKY1QTB6MEdoYkp2VGs/index.html?googlesrc=1nKzgtZKPzY8UKAGVtcktIAaU8cukUTjOg--ObQbMtPs
And here is the link to my text file if you need it:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nKzgtZKPzY8UKAGVtcktIAaU8cukUTjOg--ObQbMtPs/edit
Sorry if my post was long and confusing!
(Google Docs are in some custom format that's native to Google, like the Google equivalent of Microsoft Word .doc format. They're good for fonts and nice layout, but too difficult for the map generator to extract data from)
Instead, create the .txt file using a text editor like Notepad, and then upload it to Google Drive and use that.
Installing the Google drive application onto your computer can make this easier - it creates a directory on your computer which it keeps synced with Google Drive, so you just edit the file on your computer and it automatically updates the online one.
Other Google tips:
I just have one more thing to ask you: how do you run it from your computer without an internet connection. Sometimes, I lose access to the internet and want a way to look at the map without having internet access. I am running a computer with Linux Mint 16 installed if that is important.
Your browser will bring up the error message about there being no src specified, but the URL box at the top of the browser window should now contain the correct URL to load the map viewer locally on your computer, all you have to do is add ?src=example.txt to the end of that URL and the map will run locally. Similarly with your own location files.
The fonts are loaded from googleapis.com, so with no internet connection the map might fall back to default system fonts - it probably depends how advanced browser resource caching is these days. For what it's worth, the difference between index.html and index_local.html is that index.html tries to load some libraries from googleapis.com instead of local versions - this is faster over an internet connection due to better cache hits, but with no internet connection you'll want to use index_local.html
Btw, you weren't the first to get stuck because of a .doc file instead of a .txt file, in future I hope to detect this and provide a more helpful error message. Later perhaps even add support to google doc files (if I can), since they have such a nice collaboritive online UI for them.
1) Downloaded the zip file from your website
2) Extracted it
3) Opened index_local.html in Chrome
4) Added ?src=example.txt to the end of the url
But it still did not work. It leaves me with an error message: failed to load locations from example.txt
Thanks for all your help so far!
Do you know what the issue is?
I believe Firefox relaxes that restriction by default.
I have an older Linux Mint box at home, so if it's not Chrome I can give it a try tonight. I suspect it's some kind of browser security feature though, so you could try googling "ajax local file <browser name>"
I know what you mean about it still being cramped when fully zoomed in, there are a couple of things you can do about it:
Adding an extra zoom level
Doing this requires that you host your own copy of the Ink & Parchment map somewhere, for example Hosting your own copy of the map generator from Dropbox.Edit the index.html file and make the following changes...
1) Where the original file looks like this:
Add an extra zoom level so it looks like this:
2) Where the original file looks like this:
add a comma to the end of the last zoomlevel line and add another line, so it looks like this:
The number 4050 comes from being 1.5 times the size of 2700 - each zoom level zooms 150%
You'll notice there are 3 blocks of code that look like this, the first two are for devices with small screens, and they probably won't be able to handle a 4050 × 4050 map, so it's up to you what resolution you'd like the 5th zoom level to be for those smaller screen versions. If you expect your map to be used by ipads or iphones then zoom level 5 on the smaller screen sizes should be set to the same size as zoom level 4 - 2236 × 2236
Using an html page as the location list is briefly touched on here.
If there are no hiccups then I'll announce it in other places.
(Not fluid iframes tho, as the map is "pre-rendered" when the page loads, so its render-size will depend on the size of the frame when it loaded)
Instead of scrolling around fully zoomed-in with the electronic version, the entire map can now be printed out as a large poster.
Our SMP server's map:
(The poster-printing options can be accessed through a small icon at the bottom-left of the screen when viewing a map)
This is really great work! Not only the map itself, but all your patient work to help people get it right.
Thanks so much!!
The area seems to be quite limited. Is there a a way to get the farther in a given direction?
Thanks.
You can set the map area by adjusting the range setting, and you can set where the map is centered by adjusting the x and z.
Settings like map range and coords can be specified in the location-list file, but they can also be overriden by setting them in the URL (help on settings is here), which means you can have a default view for the map as well as links to see far off places.
With links you can cover a huge area. Our server has a spawn platform with a bunch of teleports to different parts of the world, in order to spread the players out a bit. So for the map we have this image of the spawn platform set up with hyperlinks over each teleport, so you can click on any of the teleports and it takes you to a map of that area, all from the same location-list file (which is good because the maps overlap).
(image is just for illustration, it's not hyperlinked - I don't know how to do that in BB-code)
In case anyone's not created hyperlinks inside images before, see here.
That. Is. Amazing.
I think I'm a long way off from any of that at this point. After playing around with Amidst, I've found that the maps don't reflect my world. The seed is correct because I plugged it into a single player map and generated the same map I'm playing on in the server I rent.
Thanks for the work you're doing. I think you have a fantastic idea and it will be very helpful when I get the rest of this rolling.
The copy/paste operation to paste the seed into Amidst can sometimes insert an space character at the beginning or end of the seed, and Amidst doesn't strip that out, so check for extra spaces as just having a single space at the end of the seed will completely change the map.
Another possibility is the world type might be different, e.g. set to large biomes in Minecraft but not in Amidst. That can be set in Amidst using Options → World type menu.
If this is in vanilla Minecraft, and none of those solutions helped, I'd be curious to know the seed — I can give it a go in Minecraft and Amidst.
I love this tool, but I seem to be having a problem getting the x and z setting to work. No matter what I do it always seems to be centered on 0, 0. Could you give me an example of exactly how this setting is supposed to work?