Dungeonographer Project Update

Those of you who like Hexographer may know that I’ve been working up a Dungeon mapping equivalent called “Dungeonographer” over the past two months.  It was something that I had considered for months, but when I received my 8th request within a week for “a tool like Hexographer to make dungeons,” I thought it was time.

And that’s not to say that work has stopped on Hexographer.  Absolutely not.  Many of the features in the last release of Hexographer were things that were needed and written for Dungeonographer, but those features made sense in Hexographer as well. (For example, having multiple features in a hex was something I wanted in Hexographer, but it was needed in Dungeonographer because any given square may have a chair, table, door, or some combination of all of those features.)  Likewise many of the features I’ve been working on for Dungeonographer will be tested and tweaked for use in Hexographer.

The two programs  share some of the same code, so I can write a new feature for one of the tools and if the feature also fits the purpose of the other tool it can usually be added fairly easily to the other tool now.  (Of course, the ability to do that came at a price where I had to spend some time “refactoring.”  Refactoring is what programmers call the process of making code that already works better in some way: more generic, faster, simpler, easier to test, etc.)  In this case I had some objects that were hexagon specific and I made generic versions of those objects that had all the functionality that applied whether something was a hexagon or a square. Then I extended the generic objects and made new objects that inherited the generic functionality but had code specific for Dungeonographer or Hexographer. If I didn’t explain that well I apologize.  In short: changes had to be made so that upgrades to Dungeonographer could be easily applied to Hexographer and vice versa.

So with all that out of the way, about a week and a half ago I had a list of about 30 things that I still need to do for Dungeonographer.  I finished 10 of them, but then I added 2 new issues.  Based on that progress and after examining each of the remaining issues I’m estimating alpha testing will begin in four to six weeks.  That is somewhat dependent on what other tasks pop up and any outside forces, but it includes some padding for those possible delays.  I think I’ll have some screenshots in the next week.  I’m still being coy about some of the special features in Dungeonographer, but I think I’ve found a way to make most people happy with the software’s approach and results.