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<faq>

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<item id="6">
<question>What is the accuracy of the information here?</question>
<answer>
<p>
The map locations of areas etc. and their canonical and non-canonical names
should always be accurate. Of course the data may sometimes be out of date,
new locations are not always added instantly (see also <a href="#1">this item
of this FAQ</a>).
</p>

<p>
However, the information about authors / contributors of areas, their addition
dates, and other anecdotal data may be less accurate, mostly for the "older"
areas. Anything after 2005 or so should be pretty accurate, but data for
earlier less so.

Much of the information originates from old newsposts made by wizards, other
such notes, file modification timestamps of code, <a href="#2">interviews with
wizards and players, and multitude of other sources</a>.
Inaccuracies with such "folklore" type information are inevitable.
</p>

<p>
Many of the earlier addition dates may actually be for the big "1996 conversion" or
somewhat after that, while those locations may have actually existed before the stated date.
They may also be for further recodes or changes, if earlier dates have not been found
(or confirmed by some means).
I have attempted to record the earliest "known" date when the area has almost certainly
been in the game, though for the previously stated reasons these may not be very accurate.
</p>

<p>
Additionally methods of "best estimation", deduction, guesswork, magical
thinking and time travel may have been employed to obtain dates
and information when more accurate sources are unavailable.
</p>
<p>
<b>Caveat Emptor.</b>
</p>
</answer>
</item>

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<item id="1">
<question>Why isn't location X marked in the maps?</question>
<answer>

<ul>
 <li><b>We don't know about the area.</b><br />
 If something is missing, then nobody involved in the mapping project has
 noticed it yet and nobody has bothered to report it. Typically
 I (Ggr) tend to check for added areas every once a while, but sometimes
 it may take days or weeks if I forget about it.
 </li>

 <li><b>The location is not "static".</b><br />
 If the location moves, e.g. it is an roaming NPC or area entrance that
 is not static, it is technically impossible to include it in the maps.
 </li>
 
 <li><b>The location is "hidden".</b><br />
 This applies only for the miscellaneous / city / area maps. Some locations
 in area overworld maps etc,  while possibly well-known among seasoned players,
 are not supposed to be public knowledge by design. As such, they are not
 included.
 </li>
 
</ul>

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

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<item id="2">
<question>Who are behind the "PupuMaps" project?</question>
<answer>
The PupuMaps BatMUD mapping and data maintenance project
is mainly headed by <b>Ggr</b>, who developed the Pupunen "maputils"
software package for this purpose. However, during the history of the project, there
have been numerous contributors donating their time and knowledge ...

<ul>
 <li><b>Ooga</b> - Did the original mapping of new continents, providing raw
 mapdata and some locations. His work was invaluable in the early days of
 the project.
 </li>
 <li><b>Jeskko</b> - Did his own <a href="http://jeskko.pupunen.net/gmap2/">Google Maps-style
 implementation</a>, 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.
 </li>
 <li><b>Malacoda</b> - Loaned her ship for re-mapping of Lucentium and Laenor.</li>
 <li><b>Moonlord</b>'s website - Lots of area coder information.</li>
 <li><b>Nuane</b> - More area coder information.</li>
 <li>The wizard plaque - Bits and piece of information about authors current and past.</li>
 <li><b>Dryad</b>'s archived <a
 oldhref="http://www.maroon.com/bat/logs/1996_conversion.asp"
 href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090108120439/https://www.maroon.com/bat/logs/1996_conversion.asp"
 >1996 BatMUD conversion notes</a> - Coder and addition date information.</li>
 <li>BatMUD newsposts were also searched through for area addition dates and coder info.</li>
 <li><b>Durand</b> made the HCBat raw mapdata available and has helped on
 other occasions.</li>
 <li><b>Osku</b> assisted with HCBat location data updates.</li>
 <li>And numerous other contributors have reported locations or knowledge about them, etc.</li>
</ul>

Please also see the next FAQ item concerning the history of the project.
</answer>
</item>

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<item id="3">
<question>What is the relationship between Ggr's, Jeskko's, Batclient's maps?</question>
<answer>
Currently, both two major mapsites (this and Jeskko's) and Batclient map are based
on the same data, centrally managed and known as the "PupuMaps" data.
The main differences come from representation and update frequency -
this site being the "authorative" source with the most up to date data.
Batclient locations are nowadays synchronized daily from PupuMaps main data,
but actual map "tile" data only occasionally.
Jeskko's map is synchronized on random occasions.
</answer>
</item>

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<item id="4">
<question>What's the history of this project?</question>
<answer>
A simplified timeline of PupuMaps project and various more or less related events:

<ul>
 <li><b> 2001 - 2006</b> - Tumi/Twomi maintains a popular site with an
colourized HTML map of BatMUD world and other BatMUD related tools.
 </li>

 <li><b>Early 2006</b> - 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.
 </li>

 <li><b>09 May 2006</b> - 
 <news group="inform" id="32659">B.A.T. ry announces plans</news> to produce a
 BatMUD specific game client, in co-operation with Mythicscape,
 later to be called simply "Batclient".
 </li>
 
 
 <li><b>Nov 2006</b> - 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 gnashing of teeth ensues.
 </li>
 
 <li><b>Nov 2006</b> - 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.
 </li>
 
 <li><b>7 Dec 2006</b> - Old BatWorld sinks and
 <news id="36006" group="inform">Age of Exiles starts</news>,
 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.
 </li>
 
 <li><b>8 Dec 2006</b> - 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.
 </li>

 <li><b>9 Dec 2006</b> - Ooga publishes the first map of Laenor.</li>

 <li><b>12 Dec 2006</b> - Ooga finishes mapping Rothikgen and Lucentium, though
 the Lucentium map has some bugs and misses a smallish part of the map
 (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 (to the maps and few in the game itself, as not
 all areas were immediately added back in game.)
 </li>

 <li><b>15 Dec 2006</b> - Ooga finishes mapping Desolathya and
 Furnachia.
 </li>

 <li><b>15-16 Dec 2006</b> - Jeskko publishes first version of his <a
 href="http://jeskko.pupunen.net/gmap2/">Google Maps</a>-style
 continent map, based on PupuMaps data.
 </li>

 <li><b>17 Dec 2006</b> - Ggr adds PNG image versions of maps to his site.
 </li>

 <li><b>28 Dec 2006</b> - <news id="36550" group="inform">Batclient v1.00 is released</news>.
 </li>

 <li><b>22 May 2007</b> - Ggr and Jeskko re-map Lucentium, the
 artifacts and bugs left from Ooga's original mapping are fixed.
 Additionally they do a quick re-mapping of Laenor, which gets finished on 25th of May.
 </li>


 <li><b>18 Jun 2007</b> - <news id="39132" group="bs">PupuMaps metadata format
 is extended</news> to support coder, SS and freeform information. Jeskko's
 map implementation supports it one day later.
 </li>

 <li><b>01 Jul 2007</b> - <news id="39269" group="inform">Batclient v1.40 released</news>,
 with the new realm map functionality, based on PupuMaps location data. Development
 of the feature occured partially in collaboration with Jeskko.
 </li>

 <li><b>13 Jul 2007</b> - Metadata gets extended again,
 <news id="39392" group="general">adding support</news> for location timestamps, enabling
 the creation of <a href="latest.php">latest locations</a> list feature.
 </li>

 <li><b>21-22 Dec 2007</b> - The official raw ASCII mapdata for Age of Exiles
 continents gets published officially at last.<br />
 <small>
 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)<br />
 Ooga tells Gore, Jeskko and you 'excellent'<br />
 Jeskko tells Gore, Ooga and you 'cool. Amarth might have some already
 working scripts for generating the raw files if you ask him nicely. :)'<br />
 Gore tells Ooga, Jeskko and you 'I doubt it, the batclient mapdata seems to
 be last updated October 14th :)'<br />
 </small>
 </li>

 <li><b>23 Feb 2008</b> - Nosunrise
 <news id="42168" group="general">announces the first early beta</news> of his "<a
 href="https://batshoppe.dy.fi/reincsim2/">ReincSim 2</a>", replacement for
 Twomi's famous (and by then long absent) reincarnation simulator.
 </li>

 <li><b>4 May 2008</b> - Twomi finally <a
 href="http://tuminoid.blogspot.com/2008/05/batmud-tools-by-tumi-sources-released.html">releases</a>
the <a href="http://code.google.com/p/batmudtoolsbytumi/">sources and data</a> for his tools
(now somewhat obsolete, though.) [<news id="42961" group="general">BatMUD news post announcement</news>]
 </li>

 <li><b>20 Jun 2008</b> - <a href="quests.php">Quest information</a> page is added
 and <news id="43414" group="general">announced</news>,
 generated from the recently added LQ/AQ information in location database.
 </li>

 <li><b>13 Mar 2009</b> - A more up-to-date HCBat map is introduced, thanks
 to Durand for making the raw mapdata available.</li>
 
 <li><b>06 Apr 2009</b> - OpenSearch support is added and
 <news id="46401" group="general">announced</news>,
 along with improved map of <a href="arelium.html">Arelium</a> (other citymaps got certain
 improvements for the same price, too.)
 </li>

 <li><b>14 Sep 2009</b> - <a
 href="https://www.bat.org/community/player_atlas">Player Atlas</a> bat.org
 website feature <news id="47382" group="inform">is announced</news>.
 Originally a "quick concept hack" by Ggr a
 week earlier, wizards (Amarth, Dralith, Durand) become interested and
 official version is quickly refined, with automatic integration of the
 'atlas' database.
 </li>

 <li><b>19 Sep 2009</b> - After a lengthy testing period on a separate test game server,
 <news id="47332" group="inform">BatMUD moves to use 64-bit version of the MUD driver</news>.
 Few next weeks are plaqued by semi-frequent crashes due to some remaining
 <news id="47480" group="inform">driver</news>
 <news id="47526" group="inform">bugs</news>, but they are promptly
 <news id="47573" group="inform">addressed</news> by Favorit along with other wizards.
 </li>

 <li><b>14 Apr 2010</b> - BatMUD 20 years anniversary.
 </li>

 <li><b>17 Apr 2010</b> - <a
 href="https://www.bat.org/node/104">BatMUD 20yr Anniversary Gala</a>
 at Kaivohuone, Helsinki. BatMudders from all around the world gather
 for drunken fun etc. The amount of attendees is diminished by unexpected
 volcano eruption of Eyjafjallakokull in Iceland, that causes disruption and
 closing of almost whole north-European airspace.
 </li>

 <li><b>08 Jul 2011</b> - PupuMaps site finally gets a new layout and various
 smaller improvements.
 </li>

 <li><b>31 Jan 2012</b> - Ggr immorts, but continues the map data
 maintenance as before for the foreseeable future,
 despite ascending to higher realms.
 </li>

 <li><b>09 Sep 2012</b> - Jeskko ascends to immortality as well.
 </li>

 <li><b>Mar 2014</b> - <a href="https://tnsp.org/hg/batmud/gmap2/">GMapsNG project</a> is finally finished by Ggr
 (or at least brought to state that it is usable and mostly on feature
 parity with the old version), and replaces the old BatMUD GMaps hack.
 </li>

 <li><b>03 Mar 2015</b> - Various minor updates made to the PupuMaps
 pages, and maputils tools revamped. HTML maps switched to HTML5 and
 given some JavaScript-based multimedia goodness.
 </li>


 <li><b>14 Apr 2015</b> - BatMUD's 25th anniversary.
 </li>

 <li><b>27 Apr 2016</b> - The Pupunen BatMUD Maps Project reaches
 the mature age of <b>10 years</b>! Hooray!
 </li>

 <li><b>19 Oct 2017</b> - HC-Bat map gets updated, after a 5+ year gap
 in updates. Additionally few other improvements to the map site and maps
 themselves were made.
 </li>

 <li><b>06 Nov 2017</b> -
 <news group="general" id="57755">Map search feature is re-introduced.</news>
 Originally a feature on Jeskko's GMap pages, it was removed during the GMapsNG
 refactoring. Now implemented again as an asynchronous WebSocket server.
 </li>

 <li><b>17 Sep 2019</b> - Map search gains "show nearest locations" feature.
 </li>

 <li><b>11.-13. Oct 2019</b> - Various technical and usability improvements made to
 the "city"-type maps (e.g. map of <a href="arelium.html">Arelium</a> and other major cities, and certain maps of areas).
 Also the information content has been improved, adding details that were missing, and certain
 errors fixed.
 <news group="general" id="58750">[1]</news>
 <news group="general" id="58752">[2]</news>
 </li>

 <li><b>02 Apr 2020</b> - IPv6 support enabled in map search WebSockets server, so
 now IPv6 users can connect directly to it. (Previously this was not possible due to
 old/broken libwebsockets version.)
 </li>

 <li><b>14 Apr 2020</b> - BatMUD's 30th anniversary. Due to the COVID-19 situation,
 the planned celebratory event is cancelled / postponed.
 </li>

 <li><b>Feb 2021</b> - Pupunen.net server's hard drive fails and the site becomes
 unavailable for almost two months. This includes the GMapNG BatMUD world map and
 all the Mercurial code repositories stored there. <news group="general" id="59302">Fortunately, most of
 the relevant data is also stored elsewhere.</news> The various Mercurial repositories
 previously hosted on Pupunen.net are moved to <a href="https://tnsp.org/hg/batmud/">tnsp.org</a>.
 </li>

 <li><b>17 Apr 2021</b> - BatMUD's 31th anniversary celebration. A streamed online-event
 is held, featuring arena fights with commentary, greetings videos from players and
 talks from wizards.
 </li>

 <li><b>18 Apr 2021</b> - <news group="general" id="59365">GMapNG at pupunen.net is restored to functionality by Jeskko.</news>
 </li>

 <li>... steady, though irregular location data updates continue ...</li>

 <li><b>Jan 2024</b> - Once again, a number of technical and usability improvements made to
 the "city"-type maps (e.g. map of <a href="arelium.html">Arelium</a> etc. and
 the HTML/JS world maps.
 </li>

 <li><b>Feb - Mar 2024</b> - A somewhat notable amount of "research" performed
 to put some kind of addition dates to many older areas. Also changes made to
 tooling and file formats to implement timestamp accuracy indication.
 </li>

 <li><b>18 Feb 2024</b> - HCBat map gets major updates, mainly thanks to
 inspiration from <b>Broetchen</b> and <b>Acentaja</b>.
 Ggr gets granted s a wizchar in HCBat by <b>Zin</b> to help with the updating.
 </li>
</ul>

More to come...
</answer>
</item>

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<item id="5">
<question>Is the location / map data available?</question>
<answer>
<b>Yes. PupuMaps location data is freely available to anyone who wishes to use
it</b>. Naturally some kind of acknowledgement would be preferred, if you use it in your
own projects.

<p>
Currently this data is available through the Mercurial repository of
<a href="https://tnsp.org/hg/batmud/maputils/file/tip/world">Ggr's MapUtils</a>.
You may also be interested in the utilities themselves
<a href="https://tnsp.org/hg/batmud/maputils/">https://tnsp.org/hg/batmud/maputils/</a>
and especially the file "README.loc", which contains some documentation
on the format of *.loc-files.
</p>

<p>
Bat Ry provides the raw ASCII map data for the BatMUD continents, which
is updated at every game reboot:
</p>
<ul>
 <li><a href="https://www.bat.org/maps/raw/laenor.txt">Laenor</a></li>
 <li><a href="https://www.bat.org/maps/raw/rothikgen.txt">Rothikgen</a></li>
 <li><a href="https://www.bat.org/maps/raw/furnachia.txt">Furnachia</a></li>
 <li><a href="https://www.bat.org/maps/raw/lucentium.txt">Lucentium</a></li>
 <li><a href="https://www.bat.org/maps/raw/desolathya.txt">Desolathya</a></li>
 <li><a href="https://www.bat.org/maps/raw/renardy.txt">Renardy</a></li>
</ul>
</answer>
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