Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 Blakey Feb 12, 2009 10:52:51	You might find this of some use: The Elsir Vale To put it into context Marlek is a land like Mordor in my campaign world, so it fits what we know of the lands over the Stonehome Mountains. The clickable map is one I made myself when I added Elsir Vale to my (under development) realm of Athena in my homebrew world. I will probably replace it with the "official" map soon. All the locations I've added into the Vale are on the map and clickable. I'd especially bring your attention to the city of Overlook, which is fully fleshed out with a clickable map: Overlook City Cheers Blakey
#2 paulos Feb 13, 2009 10:15:16	Nice, how'd you do that? Do you allow your PCs access to all of that? I mean do they have to explore to find out all the details abuot all the places in Overlook or do they just know if they care to read about it? Can I link my PCs to your site?
#3 Blakey Feb 13, 2009 13:42:14	I've built a database which relates all the locations, people, organizations and so on. So all the details for every thing you can see on my web page are in the database. I let my players see everything you can see there, if they can be bothered to read it. There's nothing there I consider "DM only" info. Well, actually there is but when logged in as a guest you can't see it. Only I have access to see all the DM only stuff and that comes out in the same format but is shown in red so I know its DM only. I can easily switch it to public form by flicking a switch in the database and then it becomes public. So for example there are no details on the Lost Ones in the gazetteer at this stage. Be aware this resource is for my players so some stuff in there which starts off as secret will become public when they find it out, but seeing as we're not starting SoW for another year or so I guess, you can feel safe that there should be nothing DM only in there for now. Feel free to point your players at it if you don't think they're getting too much info. Cheers Blakey
#4 paulos Feb 13, 2009 14:34:43	May I inquire what software you used to make this site, the database, the maps, etc. It looks really good.
#5 Blakey Feb 14, 2009 4:49:23	The underlying database is mySQL (free database which is a standard part of most web pages). I'm a database programmer for a living so know how to make a relational database work. The cunning thing I did was to give every location a "parent" so that it has a place in the world. So in a RL example, London is a city which has a parent of England, which has a parent of UK which has a parent of Europe which has a parent of the world. And inside London you can have boroughs which have London as their parent. Inside a borough, say Chelsea, you can have roads with Chelsea as their parent. In a road you can have houses and in each house you can have floors or rooms. There is no enforced structure, so you could say house number 4 has London as its parent if it makes sense to do it that way. For example I might well say Buckingham Palace is a palace inside London or I might be more precise about where it's located. he same applies to people - they all have locationid's to show where they are based currently. And of course because this all uses simple numbered keys if I want to move somewhere I just change its "parentid" in the Database and it is instantly moved. If I want to move a person, I just change their locationid and they appear in the new place. So if I change the parentid of Buckingham Palace from London to Paris, then this palace gets shifted in the "tree" which represents the world. Everything which was recorded as being inside Buckingham Palace, including the Queen, Princes, staff, rooms, etc, all find themselves in Paris now (because their locationid hasn't changed and is still Buckingham Palace but it has moved to Paris). And the real beauty of that is that to move things around like that, all I do is change one number in the database and the web page instantly updates itself. I don't have to write a single piece of HTML to shift London to France or The Queen to being the ruler of Timbuktoo. Just change some numbers. So I wrote a bunch of PHP pages to present the locations, people, organizations, deitys and so on. So each and every location is presented the same way; each person the same way and so on. This is because if you are looking at a location you see page "location.php" with a key of the locationid. Each location is always shown in the same way this way. As for the maps, I use an excellent piece of software called "Meracl ImageMap Generator" which is freeware. It allows you to easily build an image map based on a JPG. So that's how I have clickable maps. They're not all that hard. And a standard PHP page is used to display the map of course. The actual maps I use are either "stolen" off the Net (e.g. the map of Overlook is from DDi - to which I subscribe), or are made by me using Fractal Mapper. I've been using this for years now and have the whole World of Rodinia set up inside FM. Its very simple to use and generates some pretty cool maps. No doubt better stuff is out there but I like this as it's easy to use and very cheap! The web site has taken me some time to put together but what is nice about it is that the whole web page is only something like 15 PHP files. Instead of having a new page for every location, I have a new entry in the database. And if I want to change the look and feel of every location in the world, I can do it by changing location.php and all the locations will be displayed using this new layout, rather than having to edit one page for each and every location in my world. Easy maintenance! Finally, I have a table called Sections which is where the text fits in. These Sections are associated with a given location, person, deity, campaign, etc. Each Section has a heading and then each Section has a number of Paragraphs associated with it. This is how the main text of the site is held. So all that text is actually held in text fields in the database. Again, this means that to write some more words about a location in the world I just enter text into the database without having to write any HTML. The HTML to present it is all done by the PHP pages running the site. There is no HTML in the database at all. As such this data could be presented in any number of ways in the future. If a new way comes along to present this information, then as long as I can get the info out of the database, I can easily present it using that new method. Future proofing too! Thanks for the interest! Cheers Blakey