I just finished my map browser for BattleGroup42 1.7 (a Battlefield 1942 mod).
(Click for larger)
The browser: Battlegroup42.djbarney.org
The site has been accepted well by the core BattleGroup42 dev team and they have added the browser to the mod encyclopaedia.
BattleGroup42 has a 138 maps. The browser should make it a bit easier to find the right map to play. BattleGroup42, by default, has it's maps arranged by date. This puts the focus on historical accuracy but it can sometimes be a little difficult to find a map if you just know it by it's name. So the browser adds an alphabetical arrangement. I can already see an improvement I need to make. I need to add the date for each map in the alphabetical browser to make it easier to cross reference to the date in the in game map menu.
Observant video game warriors might notice that there is more than just listing of the maps going on. Each map has health an ammo locations marked as well as other points of interest. In later releases I hope to allow players to find where specific custom vehicles are so you can, for example, look back through previous news releases, pick an interesting vehicle, and then pick the map that has that particular vehicle on it and know where to find it.
The method I used to create the site was quite challenging. I know how to write Linux Bash scripts. The entire site is generated from a single script with a few custom edits to tidy things up. This has the advantage of updates being relatively easy to roll out ... for the upcoming 1.8 release for example. However the site creation was not without it's headaches (any developers will know how it is).
Thanks to the BattleGroup42 dev team for allowing me to use their official graphics, and to Eric Haines, a.k.a. [Fredhead] for his wonderful Perl script that generates the annotated maps.
Rock on Battlegroup42 !
