For those people (like me) who feel that mapping these games is part of the fun, you might want to check out Trizbort. It's only for Windows. I think it's a pretty good effort for a first version.

thanks for posting that, it looks really usefull. when i finally get time to play through some of my old classics i'll give it a try.

I asked this in another thread as well:

Wasn't there a tool that automatically mapped the game you were playing? I feel like I remember playing like that...

Thanks! I'll give it a try.
I always end redrawing these maps over and over...
On the other hand, i love squared paper :)

Well after successfully installing Leisure Suite Larry 6 talkie version(thanks to Al Lowe's page), I decided to try out THAT (lol easy to guess) text game that comes with the Leisure Suite Larry Collection Series with the program Trizbort.

So far it works, really well.

Thanks Narny for that tip.

Yes, there was. Or at least, it was incorporated as a feature in a mapping tool.

I kinda want to say it was a feature in GUEMap (which was the big dog in the late 90s for the IF scene).

My memory's a bit hazy, but I want to say it created new 'rooms' as you played, though I seem to recall it easily getting confused, particularly with games that used nonstandard directions/exits, which Infocom games are notorious for.

A quick glance shows it's still around (I think), with the long awaited 2.0 released in 2007.


Of course, I haven't used the thing since the late '90s, and the site doesn't mention it being updated for XP, so...Don't know how well it works/if it works or if it's still shareware/trialware or if the guy's made it freeware.

Oi! Thanks a lot!

This is indeed the mapping tool I had used years ago. However, it looks like my memory was quite hazy, too.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work quite es well as I had remembered. BUT thanks to some additional search results Google provided I found IFMapper.

And THAT does provide automapping.
It essentially works by analyzing the transcripts of Infocom-games (a text file the game creates when using the "SCRIPT" command in game).

And, really, it works rather well. It auomatically adds rooms, marks your current room and even tries to guess possible exits according to the room description.
And, of course, it realigns rooms constantly so the map makes sense.
It even adds items you pick up or drop to the room description.

Of course, there are limitations. It won't work "in a maze of twisty little passages all alike" as each room has the same name and description.
And it does add "pitch black" rooms as separate rooms once you light a lantern.


All in all it's a great tool and something that really enhances gameplay for me.

The only downside is the installation: It uses ruby and might be a little strange to get it to run.

Hey thanks man. I'll try it out - got to make a more straight forward Zork map than my own effort, half a dozen A4 sheets celotaped together full of circles linked with lines resembling a bunch of spaghetti! :)

Dude this is amazing!! I find text adventures so difficult to play through!

I found trizbort today, and immediately mailed the guy to thank him for his fantastic work. This program needs more publicity! I also asked him whether he would be willing to implement a new feature that would allow inserting unlabeled rooms on the map so as to make trizbort more useful for players of old, dusty RPGs such as the first few chapters in the Might and Magic series -- mapping larger areas with the current version is a bit cumbersome as you have to manually remove the default "Cave" label every time you insert a new room :)

This makes mapping so much easier, thanks for the tip, Narny! :D

Now that I'm seriously considering buying these games, I really hope that trizbort is easy to use ^^;; I'm just not that familiar with dos. I'll let you guys know how it goes!

Is there a program that allows you to search? For instance if you remembered that there was an axe somewhere but didn't know where you could search through the items in all rooms and could find where it was located?