There’ve been many updates to Trizbort.io over the past months, and I’d like to take a moment to list some of them here. Since Trizbort.io is now on Github, there have been wonderful contributions from several developers, making the application steadily better.

Important bugfixes

  • Panning the map - Previously, the map could only be panned by holding down the mouse wheel. This may not have been the best design choice, since it’s not obvious, and not everyone has a clickable mouse wheel. It’s now possible to drag the map by holding down the right mouse button, as well.

  • Chrome file loading - It was reported that Chrome would only allow the user to load a map once, then allow no further loads. This has now been fixed.

  • Object containment relationships - It’s always been possible to organize objects in a containment relationship (e.g. the wooden chest contains an envelope, which in turn contains a small key), but it wasn’t obvious how it should be done in the user interface (hint: dragging an object into another object). Worse, dragging failed to work on Chrome. This has now been fixed, and a tutorial has now been added to point out the dragging possibility.

New features

  • Code generation for object containment - Authoring system languages that support object containment now have their code exported with containment relations (TADS, Inform, Quest). Also, the YAML export feature takes object relationships into account.

  • Image export - The full map can now be exported to an image of any size, large enough to accommodate all the map elements, i.e. you can now make a poster out of it. There was a bug with export only working if there was a room in the precise center of the map, but that’s been fixed. Curved paths are neatly contained within the map, and not chopped off.

  • Navigation - The application main menu has been reorganized to provide a better overview of the available options.

  • Tutorial system - Originally, Trizbort.io came with no instructions, and users were expected to simply figure out how it all worked. We’ve now added a tutorial system that pops up occasional messages with helpful hint. In particular object containment was a non-obvious feature.

  • YAML support - Trizbort.io can now export maps to YAML, which can be useful if your development pipeline can easily consume YAML (rather than JSON, which is Trizbort.io’s default save format). I’ve read about a team using Trizbort.io to create maps for their adventuring system, and they wrote a Python script to convert JSON to their format. Perhaps this will be useful to them.

  • ZIL support - Trizbort.io always claimed that one day it would support ZIL code generation. There is now an implementation for that.