
[Q] What format is Starmap saving those world maps in... I'd like
to print them & transfer them to .gifs for my web pages.

[A] Starmap uses a subsidiary program called Hexworld to do its world
mapping. You can enter Hexworld by creating a ".hex" attachment to
either the quadrant maps or a starsystem map. Hexworld saves it's maps
in a coded text format, and it puts these maps in the <galaxy>\loc
directory, using <file>.hex as the file name. Just to show an example
of one of these files, here's rag\loc\newhome.hex:

New Home
JJJJJJJJJJJJPPJJJJJJJJJJJJJPJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJ
PJJJJJJJJJJJJJPPJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJPPJJJJJJJJJKJJJPJJJJJJJJJKKJJJ
JJJJJJJJJJJJKJJJJJJJJJJJJJJKPJJJJJKJJJKKJKPPJJJJJJJKKKKKJJJKKKKKKJJJPP
JJKKKGGKJJJJJPJJJKKKGKKKKJJJJKKKKKKKKKKJJJJJJKKJJKKJKKJJPJJJJJKKKJJJJJ
PPJJJJJJJKKJKJJKJJJJJJJJJJPPJJJJJJJJJJJJJPJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJ
JJJJJJJJJJJJJJPJJJJJJJJJJJJJPPJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJPPJJJJJJJJJJJJJP
JJJJJKJJJJJJJJJJJJJJKKJJJJJJJJJJJJKJJJJJJJPJJJJJJJJJJJJJPPJJJJJJJJJJJJ
Start at hex 275
275 Haven:haven.mnu

The first line, "New Home", is the name of the world. The next seven
lines each contain seventy characters, comprising a total of 490
characters when taken all together. These 490 characters represent the
colors of each of the various hexes on the map (there being a total of
490 hexes on the map). The colors are coded as follows:

    A  Black    E  Red       I  Dark Grey     M  Light Red
    B  Blue     F  Magenta   J  Light Blue    N  Light Magenta
    C  Green    G  Brown     K  Light Green   O  Light Yellow
    D  Cyan     H  White     L  Light Cyan    P  Bright White

The natural question, of course, is which hex is which? You can figure
this out by going into Hexworld and hitting the F1 key once you are
there. There should be a little "Hex:000" on the left side of the map
display. The "000" part will keep changing as you move around the map
using the arrow keys. In this way, you can get a feel for the ordering
of how the hexes are numbered.

Just as a hint, it starts out as something like this:

           29
       15   30
   01   16   31
    02   17   32
     03   18   33
      04   19   34
       05   20   35
        06   21   36
         07   22   37
          08   23   38
           09   24   39
            10   25   40
             11   26   etc...
              12   27   etc...
               13   28 
                14

The next line, "Start at hex 275", tells the program where to initially
locate the circle that you use to move around the map.

"275 Haven:haven.mnu" simply writes "Haven" at hex #275 and attaches
"haven.mnu" to that location. You can put quite a few of these location
markers on the map, and they don't all have to have files or menus attached.

If you're looking for an easy way to turn these Hexworld maps into gifs,
there are a couple different techniques you can try out. The first and
more obvious is to use the F10 key to save the map as a bitmap. You can
then call it up with some paint/photo software and resave it as a gif
file or a jpeg.

Also, Henrique Vianna (snoopy@ufpel.tche.br) has written a program
called "Capture It!", which is a screen-capturing utility that runs
in the background under DOS as a terminate-and-stay-resident program.
"Capture It!" is available at the SimTel archive:

 ftp://ftp.uoknor.edu/pub/simtelnet/msdos/screen/capture22.zip

Included in the package is a program that converts the screen
captures to GIF format. From there, you can probably load your
GIFs into some paint-program and do your printing that way.

Another method is to use the grab.com and graphcnv.exe utilities,
which are part of the WordPerfect 5.1 package (they probably exist
in some other versions as well). If you have WP51, type "grab /h"
and "graphcnv /h" for more information.

Yet another method, which nearly everyone has at their disposal, is
to access Starmap via a DOS-Window from Windows, then to take a
screen capture via the Alt-PrintScreen function, and then to
Edit/Paste the map into some other Windows program. If you have an image
editing program such as Corel or Paint Show Pro, that would probably do
the job and should even let you convert the map into one of the various
standard image formats, but if you're just looking to print the map, you
could probably just paste it into "Write", which is under the
"Accessories" program group, and use the print function from there.

If you come up with any other methods which you think are pretty
straight-forward and fairly accessible for most people, please let
me know about them.

