@DATABASE HEROQUEST_MAPMAKER @NODE MAIN "Hero Quest MapMaker contens" Contents: --------- @{" Introduction " LINK INTRO} @{" Installing HQMM " LINK INSTALL} @{" System requirements " LINK SYSREQ} @{" Starting HQMM " LINK START} @{" Creating HQ missions " LINK CREATE} @{" Menu options " LINK MENU} @{" Remarks " LINK REMARKS} @{" Program history " LINK HISTORY} @{" Disclaimer " LINK DISCLAIM} @ENDNODE @NODE INTRO "Introduction" If you have never played Hero Quest, the board game, I can only recommend you to do so, but you do not need to read any further. If you did play Hero Quest or even own the game set, you may be disappointed that you finished the game so soon, because there are only fourteen missions in the Book of Missions. Of course there is a Mission design set for you to buy, but here in the Netherlands it sells for fl. 25,- (about $15) and I believe you can only create six new missions. Here enters HQMM - the HeroQuest MapMaker. This program enables you to create new missions on your very own Amiga and print them. You can create your own Book of Missions, all complete with Mentor's introduction, remarks and all the symbols of the Book of Missions. Here is a summary of HQMM's features: - All symbols of enemies and objects of the Hero Quest set scanned in very high resolution pictures. - Mentor's story is printed on a piece of frayed paper in a Hero Quest like font. - Remarks can be placed on the map as capitals surrounded by a circle. The remarks's text will be printed below Mentor's story. - Partial localisation: all fixed words that will be written on your mission paper are in English by default, but can be edited. For now these are the words 'Remarks' and 'Roaming monster' and also the name of the current roaming monster. - Shading of unused rooms. Rooms and corridors which can not be accessed by the heroes are darkened, as in the orginal Book of Missions. - Easy to understand user interface. Just select the objects you want to place on the map and press the mouse button to drop it onto the map. HQMM will warn you for illegal moves or when you use to much objects. - Of course any mission can be saved to and loaded from disk, printed or cleared. @ENDNODE @NODE INSTALL "Installation" @ENDNODE @NODE SYSREQ "System requirements" In order to run the Hero Quest MapMaker on your Amiga you will need at least the following set-up: - any Amiga able to display PAL screens (any European or ECS/AGA Amiga). - Kickstart and Workbench 2.0 or higher - the libraries asl.library, diskfont.library and iffparse.library, all version 37 or higher (OS2.0) - the fonts Times/18 and Times/24 installed in your FONTS: directory - 1 MB of free memory - a printer would be practical @ENDNODE @NODE START "Starting HQMM" HQMM can be started in three different ways: from the Workbench: Open the HQMM-drawer and click on the HQMM icon. HQMM will start up with an empty map-screen. from the Workbench via a Project-icon: Open the drawer which holds your HQMM projects and double click on a HQMM project. HQMM will start up with the selected project on the map. Note that HQMM must be in the same directory as the projects, or HQMM must be in the search path. (You might want to add the line 'path add' to the file s:User-startup.) from the CLI or Shell: Open a CLI or Shell window if none is already open. CD to the HQMM directory and use 'HQMM ' to start up HQMM. If an (optional) project name is given, that project will be loaded, else HQMM will start up with an empty map. @ENDNODE @NODE CREATE "Creating HQMM missions" In order to create a complete Hero Quest mission you have to do three things: - Place the objects, enemies, doors and traps you want to use on the Hero Quest board (I will refer to the board as 'the map' as well). - Write the intoduction story for this mission. - Write the remarks for this mission and place the references to these remarks on the map. These three steps may be done in any order or they can even be mixed. 1) PLACING OBJECTS, ENEMIES, DOORS AND TRAPS Before you start building the mission, it might be easy to set up all the objects, doors, etc. on the real Hero Quest board, so that you have a better view of what your mission is going to look like. Placing objects, enemies and traps on the map is all done in the same way: press the button with the name of your choice: Enemies, Objects or Traps. I will refer to all these three things as objects in the sequence of this text. You will be given a requester which holds a list with all the choices available for that kind of object. If you select one, its symbol will be shown in the square box on the top right side of the requester. Once you have selected the right object, press 'OK'. You will notice that the main screen also has a square box on the top right side. Your selected object will now also be shown in this box, only smaller. It may be that through the reducing of the size the image is not quite recognisable. The print out will use the big scaled images however, so keep in mind that the final result on your printer will look somewhat better than the map on your monitor screen. Beneath the box are two arrows. Press one of these to rotate the selected object over 90 degrees. Note that some objects (f.e. all enemies) can not be rotated. Pressing one of the arrow buttons then will not have any result. If you now move the mouse pointer over the map, it will drag a box with it, the same size of the currently selected object. Pressing the left mouse button will place the selected object on the current marked squares on the map. If one of these squares is already occupied by another object, or if not all squares are in the same room, you will get an error message in the status box beneath the map. Also if you try to place more objects on the map than are present in the Hero Quest set, you will be warned. For example, you can not place more than two tables on the map. Exceptions are made for all enemies. Because they can be killed during the game by the heroes, you are allowed to place more on the map than actually are in the set. In the Statistics menu, you can get general information about all enemies, but also how many you have currently placed on the board. Doors are placed in the same manner, but there is one small difference: doors are placed between two squares instead of on one square (the secret doors however, are placed on one square; these are placed just as normal objects). To place a door, select one of the squares it should access. If this square is not placed next to a wall, you will get an error message. If the square only has got a wall on one side, the door will placed in that wall. In case a square has walls on more sides (in practice never more than two) you will be presented with a requester that asks you to which side the door should open. Select the desired direction and press 'OK'. If you hace placed an object onto the map that you wanted somewhere else, or that you did not need after all, select the 'Delete' checkbox. The program is then in delete-mode. All squares you select will be cleared and the objects that stand on these squares will be removed. Doors can be removed by clearing the square on which they were placed. This one of the squares next to the door. If you do not remember on which square you placed the door (which is very likely) just try clearing both sides. After you cleared a square, the map may be distorted, so it will have to be drawn all over again. This may take a few seconds. 2) WRITING THE STORY every mission has its own introduction story. In this story Mentor explains the heroes which situation they have fallen into and what is their mission objective. To edit this story press the 'Story' button on the main screen. You will get a requester which has some string-gadgets. In the top one you enter the title, i.e. the name, of this mission. In the one directly beneath it, you can enter your story. You can also import the story from an ASCII file, or export it to an ASCII file. To do this select the buttons labeled 'Import ASCII' and 'Export ASCII'. Please do not use any strange characters or lay-outs in these ASCII files. An ideal story file exists of one stream of sentences, without any TABS or other lay-out codes. If you want your output in another language than English, you can enter the right translations of the words 'Remarks' and 'Roaming monster'. For example in Dutch these are 'Opmerkingen' and 'Dwalend monster'. In this requester you can also select which monster should be used when a player draws a 'Roaming monster'-card form the stack of treasure cards. The name of the currently selected monster is shown in a string gadget. You can edit this name as well, in order to adapt it to your language. In Dutch again, you might want to replace 'Goblin' by 'Kobold'. If you are satisfied with your story and other changes, press 'OK'. If not press 'Cancel'. None of the changes made will be used then. 3) WRITING & PLACING REMARKS To create a remark, press the 'Remarks' button on the main window. You will get a requester, which shows a list of all previously entered remarks. These will be shown by their reference letter, f.e. A, B or X. To view the text for this remark, select the letter, and the text will be shown in a string gadget. The text in this gadget can be edited. To add a new remark, press the button 'New remark'. The cursor will be placed in a small string gadget, labeled ID. Enter the reference letter here, that is A, B, etc. You can not use a letter already used before and you can only use capital letters. (If lower cast letters are used, they are automatically changed into capitals.) Then you can enter the remark text. If you are satisfied with your input, press the button 'Add' and the remark will be added to the list. Press 'OK' to place this remark on the map, or select an other remark to place on the map. Pressing cancel will not undo your changes, but will let you return to the main screen without any remark selected. This also means you can not delete a remark. But remarks that have no reference placed on the map will not be saved to disk, so you will lose these if you save your project and reload it later. If you have selected a remark and pressed 'OK' you will return to the main screen. The remark reference will be shown in the square box. Note that a remark reference is always surrounded by a circle, except for the X, since in the original Book of Missions this letter is always used without circle. Placing a remark onto the map is done in the same way as placing the other objects. The same remark reference may be placed onto the map as often as you wish. The text for this remark will only be printed once of course. If you have worked through all these steps, you can print your mission, or save it to edit or print it later. To learn how to perform these actions see @{" Menu options " LINK MENU} @ENDNODE @NODE MENU "Menu options" There are three menus with diverse items: -Project - New - Open - Save - Save as - Print - About - Quit - Statistics - Enemy info - All sorts of enemies... - Settings - Shade rooms - Create icons I will now briefly describe the effect of all these options. PROJECT MENU New: New will clear all data entered. The map will be cleared and the story deleted. The localisation changes will be saved however. If changes were made since the last load or save operation, you will first be asked if you are sure you want to do this. Open: Open will load previously stored mission into HQMM. You will get the ASL filerequester to select a file. Press 'Cancel' to abort the load action. If you had made changes to your mission since the last load or save action, these will be lost, so you will be asked first if you want to read the new data over them. Save: Save will save the data under the name last used for saving or loading. If no name was given before, you will get the ASL requester to select a file to save to. Save as: This works the same as 'Save' with the difference that you will always get the ASL requester to select the save file. Print: This option will print the current mission to your printer. Make sure you have the printer preferences installed correctly for your printer. If installed correctly, the printing requires one complete A4 page, so make sure the print head is at the top of a page, before you start printing. Printing can be aborted by pressing the 'Abort' button that will show op during printing. About: About will show you the version number of HQMM, when it was last changed and which people helped making it. Quit: This does exactly what you suppose it does: it quits HQMM. If you have any changes made to your project since the last save or load, you will be asked first if you are sure you want to quit. STATISTICS MENU This menu has only one option: Enemy info. The Enemy info item has a number of subitems. These subitems include all enemies that are present in the base set of Hero Quest. If you select one of these, information about this type of enemy will be shown, such as: - number of dice used when attacking; - number of dice used when defending; - number of dice used for walking (presently always 2); - Body points (presently always 1); - Intelligence points; - How many you have placed on the board currently. SETTINGS MENU This menu has two options: Shade empty rooms?:This option will make all rooms that can not be accessed by the heroes or the monsters somewhat darker, just as in the original Book of Missions. If you do not want that, deselect this option. Create Icons?: If this option is selected, all data files that are saved, get an matching .info file, so that these files are visible on the Workbench and can be selected to start HQMM. @ENDNODE @NODE REMARKS "Remarks" If you have any remarks, complaints, questions or whatever about HQMM, send a letter to the following address: Camiel Rouweler Weldam 2 5655 JG Eindhoven the Netherlands (sorry, no E-mail or anything like that) If you have found any bugs or you would like to see some improvements, you can contact me at the same address. Please do not forget to write which version of HQMM you are currently using and if necessary include a discription of your system set-up, in particular the type of Amiga you own, memory size and Kickstart version. Also if you have created any interesting HQ-mission, you can always send them to me. @ENDNODE @NODE HISTORY "History" Improvements and bug fixes on HeroQuest MapMaker since 31-oct-1993. ------------------------------------------------------------------- 12-feb-1994 Another 'secret door'-bug. Since v1.04 secret doors would get their own square allocated, but not when the data was read from a file. A similar problem occurred with the loading of remarks: if the same remark was placed on the board more than once, only the first time a square would get allocated. Fixed. (v1.14) 25-jan-1994 Bug found: the image for the spear trap might not be displayed correctly, or might not even be displayed at all. Because I forgot to initialize a matching structure. Fixed. (v1.13) 22-dec-1993 The gargoyle will now be placed centered within its box. Because this image is wider than the other enemies' images, it does not fit exactly in a square. Now it is placed as in the original book of missions. The text in the text-gadget at the bottom of the screen will also be shown centered, at least if you have V39 or higher. (v1.12) 24-nov-1993 When HQMM is run via a project icon, the stacksize would be too small and the program would crash during printing. Now the stacksize in the project icons will be set to 10000. (v1.11) 24-nov-1993 Before opening the main screen, HQMM will test if it might be able to use the DBLPAL monitor's hireslace mode, to avoid flicker. Unfortunately, I own just a cheap 1084S, so I could not really test if it works, but I should not know why it doesn't. But if you have AGA and a multiscan monitor, please let me know if it works fine. (v1.10) 07-nov-1993 I added a console window that opens when HQMM fails to do so. It shows the main problems that could have caused HQMM to fail. (v1.09) 06-nov-1993 By testing on a 2.0 Amiga (mine has 3.0) I discovered some major bugs! I found out that the version of the diskfont.library on many 2.0 systems is 36 and not 37 as I presumed. This caused a silent fail of HQMM on these machines. When I had corrected this bug, I was confronted with another surprise: the 2.0 gadtools.library would not create my gadgets. After a long search I discovered that under 2.0 it is not allowed to set the NewGadget.ng_TextAttr field to NULL to have the library to use the standard screen font. After I corrected this too, all worked well, as far I was able to test. Thanks Patrick for your patience while I used your Amiga as a test machine! (v1.08) 05-nov-1993 Personal preferences (settings menu settings and locale settings) can be saved via a settings menu option. These settings are stored in a directory called HQMM in the ENVARC: assignment. The stored preferences are read again on startup. (v1.07) 05-nov-1993 The preferences as set in the settings menu are now saved into every datafile. (v1.06) 05-nov-1993 By some inconsistencies in the startup-scripts I use, I lost a source file update and was left with v1.01 of that file. Fortunately, there were only small changes, so I could restore my faults quickly. I added my address to the about-text so that people will not have to work through the doc file to find it in case they have found bugs or just want to write me for an other reason. (v1.05) 03-nov-1993 Bug found: Secret doors would not get a square allocated, like normal doors (these need no square allocated, since they are placed on borders between squares). It could then be possible to place an other object on top of the secret door. Fixed. (v1.04) 03-nov-1993 Bug found: when 'New' was selected from the Project menu, all data and the map would be erased. The story and the title remained unchanged however. Now they are cleared as well. (v1.03) 03-nov-1993 Bug found: when a door was to be placed on the board, no checking was done to see if the maximum number of doors on the board was already reached. It could happen that more doors would be used than actually are in the Hero Quest set. Fixed. (v1.02) 01-nov-1993 Bug found: the routine which makes the unused rooms dark only saw doors in the room they were created in, not in the room they led to. Fixed. (v1.01) 31-oct-1993 First complete working program: version 1.00. @ENDNODE @NODE DISCLAIM "Disclaimer" The Hero Quest MapMaker or shortly HQMM is public domain. You may use it and create copies of it if you stick to the following rules: 1) The creators of HQMM are in no way responsible for loss of data, system damage, pyschologic damage, or financial damage, that results from the use of HQMM. All responsibility for using and copying HQMM lies by the user. 2) No money may be earned by selling HQMM to others. Only a reasonable fee may be asked for disk and copy costs. This may never be more than $10 or equivalent in other currencies. 3) HQMM may not be included in a public domain series without the written permission of the author(s). I hereby grant Fred Fish the permission to include HQMM in his AmigaLibDisk library. 4) HQMM must be distributed in its original form, that is the uninstalled form. No changes may be made to the binaries and accompanying files. Also all accompanying files must be distributed with HQMM. 5) HQMM may not be sold as part of a commercial product without the written permission of the author(s). Also see 2). @ENDNODE