Pupunen BatMUD Maps - Frequently Asked Questions

There are basically three reasons why some location might not be included in the PupuMaps data.

• We don't know about the area.
  
  This is probably the most common reason. There's no conspiracy, all locations will be added eventually when we find out about them. If something is missing, then nobody involved in the mapping project has found it yet and nobody has bothered to report it yet.



• The area is new and has no location marker (aka it is "hidden").
  
  For new "hidden" locations, we have a grace period of varying length. This is because such area is probably intended to be hard to find. These will be added after the location has become "generally known" - whatever that means in practice. :)



• The coder of the area has requested the location not to be shown
  
  If an archwizard or a wizard responsible for the area requests that his/her area not to be marked in the mapdata, PupuMaps project will respect this wish. However, as of January 2008, no such requests have been received and all "known" locations are included in the maps.

NOTICE! Under no circumstances locations will be left out due to intimidation, threats or blackmail from players wishing to hide knowledge of some area. If any such notes or threats are received, they may be posted publicly on this website.

The PupuMaps BatMUD mapping and data maintenance project is mainly headed by Ggr, who developed the Pupunen "maputils" software package for this purpose. The second in command is Jeskko. However, during the history of the project, there have been numerous contributors donating their time and knowledge ...

• Ooga - Did the original mapping of new continents, providing raw mapdata and some locations. His work was invaluable in the early days of the project. He still maintains his own popular mapsite, which is nowadays based on PupuMaps location data, however.



• Jeskko - Did his own Google Maps-style implementation, which has become rather popular. Worked with BatMUD staff to assist development of Batclient's map feature (which was based on his map style). Has also helped with Laenor and Lucentium re-mapping, general project assistance, various locations, and provides pupunen.net hosting.



• Malacoda - Loaned her ship for re-mapping of Lucentium and Laenor.
• Moonlord's website - Lots of area coder information.
• Nuane - More area coder information.
• The wizard plaque - Bits and piece of information about coders current and past.
• Dryad's archived 1996 BatMUD conversion notes - Coder and addition date information.
• BatMUD newsposts were also searched through for area addition dates and coder info.
• And numerous other contributors have reported locations or knowledge about them, etc.

Please also see the next FAQ item concerning the history of the project.

Currently, all three "major" mapsites and Batclient map are based on more or less the same location data, centrally managed and known as the "PupuMaps" data. This is why all the maps are simply different representations of the same data. The history of PupuMaps has its roots in time before the new "Age of Exiles", and the actual start of the mapping project. (See also the timeline below.)

A simplified timeline of PupuMaps project and various more or less related events:

• 2001 - 2006 - Tumi/Twomi maintains a popular site with an colourized HTML map of BatMUD world and other BatMUD related tools.



• Early 2006 - Ggr starts developing first piece of maputils, to make an improved version of the BatCity map. mkbcmap is born and maputils code is imported into Subversion repository in April 27th. The map is eventually featured on bat.org website and Durand awards Ggr two taskpoints for it.



• 09 May 2006 - B.A.T. ry announces plans to produce a BatMUD specific game client, in co-operation with Mythicscape, later to be called simply "Batclient".



• Nov 2006 - Twomi does the "WELL FOLKS" routine and retires with some noise, taking his map and other projects, like the reinc-simulator, offline. Much whining and crapthrowing ensues.



• Nov 2006 - Almost immediately, several replacement maps are created, including one by Jeskko. Some people resort to using archived copies of Twomi's old map, from Google cache etc.



• 7 Dec 2006 - Old BatWorld sinks and Age of Exiles starts, players find themselves on shores of continent of Laenor. During the other whining and gnashing of teeth, archwizards inform that their immediate plans do not include making continent mapdata public, thus creating the need for player-led mapping.



• 8 Dec 2006 - Ggr creates first version of mkmap utility to stitch together map pieces from logfiles mapped via walking around. Ggr and Jeskko start mapping Laenor. Ooga starts his own mapping effort, which ultimately progresses much faster.



• 9 Dec 2006 - Ooga publishes the first map of Laenor.



• 12 Dec 2006 - Ooga finishes mapping Rothikgen and Lucentium, though the Lucentium map has some bugs and misses a part (this remains to be the case for a rather long time). Several utilities are developed by Ggr, the first results of Pupunen mapping project are published. Lots of locations are added during the next two weeks.



• 15 Dec 2006 - Ooga finishes mapping Desolathya and Furnachia.



• 15-16 Dec 2006 - Jeskko publishes first version of his Google Maps-style continent map, based on PupuMaps data.



• 17 Dec 2006 - Ggr adds PNG image versions of maps to his site.



• 28 Dec 2006 - Batclient v1.00 is released.



• 22 May 2007 - Ggr and Jeskko re-map Lucentium, the artifacts and bugs left from Ooga's original mapping are fixed. Re-mapping Laenor finished on 25th of May.



• 18 Jun 2007 - PupuMaps metadata format is extended to support coder, SS and freeform information. Jeskko's map implementation supports it one day later.



• 01 Jul 2007 - Batclient v1.40 released, with the new realm map functionality, based on PupuMaps location data. Development of the feature occured partially in collaboration with Jeskko.



• 13 Jul 2007 - Metadata gets extended again, adding support for location timestamps, enabling the creation of latest locations list feature.



• 21-22 Dec 2007 - The official raw ASCII mapdata for Age of Exiles continents gets published officially.
  
  Gore tells Jeskko, Ooga and you 'unless I get some heavy objections tomorrow, I will arrange to make the rawdata available to ease up map updates.' (Fri Dec 21 01:04:11 2007)
  
  Ooga tells Gore, Jeskko and you 'excellent'
  
  Jeskko tells Gore, Ooga and you 'cool. Amarth might have some already working scripts for generating the raw files if you ask him nicely. :)'
  
  Gore tells Ooga, Jeskko and you 'I doubt it, the batclient mapdata seems to be last updated October 14th :)'
  
  



• 23 Feb 2008 - Nosunrise announces the first early beta of his "ReincSim 2".



• 4 May 2008 - Twomi finally releases the sources and data for his tools (now somewhat obsolete, though.) [BatMUD news post announcement]



• 20 Jun 2008 - Quest information page is added and announced, generated from the recently added LQ/AQ information in location database.

More to come...

Yes. PupuMaps location data is freely available to anyone who wishes to use it. (Some kind of acknowledgement would preferred, of course.)

Currently this data is available through the Subversion repository of Ggr's MapUtils: http://svn.pupunen.net/public/maputils/trunk/maps/ You may also be interested in the utilities themselves http://svn.pupunen.net/public/maputils/trunk/ and especially the file "README.loc", which contains some documentation on the format of *.loc-files.

Also, Bat Ry provides the raw ASCII map data for the BatMUD continents: http://www.bat.org/maps/raw/

(Direct links not provided to reduce possible traffic from search engines)