More on maps and BatMUD archeology ...

Perhaps my previous blog post lit up some kind of fire, or the other
maps-related activity of late (Jeskko's vibe-refactored world map) inspired
me to work more on improving my map tooling for a day or two. The changes
include showing coordinates of terrain under mouse cursor for the continent
maps and various other under-the-hood improvements.

It also reminded me about the "historical" bits and pieces I've had laying
around for a while. For example, I had stored versions of the old world map
during the great sinking / flood during year 2006 just before our move to
the Age of Exiles. Also some earlier versions of the BatWorld map from 2001
and late 1999 were in my collection, albeit the 1999 version only in GIF
image format. All of these lacked any kind of location data.

The obvious basis for reconstructing at least some of the locations were the
HCBat world map as HC is a "fork" of BatMUD circa late 2001. Another source
was Twomi's original BatMap, copies of which can be found via Internet
Archive. Latter one needed some tooling to get the locations from it, which
I already did some years ago.

That 1999 GIF image version of the map required a converter and some manual
work, which took  maybe hour or two to get as good as I could. Then some
adjustments were done for location extraction and combining with "known"
data, etc.

The results are not perfect (yet). There are many unknown locations, the
location label alignments are wonky and there are probably some mistakes.
Road tiles in the 1999 version are wrong because of the lossy conversion.
Maybe sometime in the future some of these things will be rectified.

For the time being, you can see the results via following links:

https://tnsp.org/maps/1999-11-20.html
https://tnsp.org/maps/2001-12-14.html

https://tnsp.org/maps/2006-11-30.html
https://tnsp.org/maps/2006-12-06.html
https://tnsp.org/maps/2006-12-07.html

Enjoy.