Questions about using stdr

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When running stdr, all I could find were launchers which launched the server + the Gui + a specific (or no) map:http://wiki.ros.org/stdr_launchers?distro=kinetic

In the GUI there are commands for loading a different map, but they don't seem to work at all. In other words, I have the maze like map in the right, I ask to load another map, the command completes without error, and yet the maze doesn't change.

I saw a video that seemed to show the map being cleared, after which a new map was loaded. But I can't figure out how to get the map to clear.

So to be specific:

roslaunch stdr_launchers server_no_map.launch

does not display the GUI, and:

roslaunch stdr_launchers server_with_map_and_gui_plus_robot.launch

does display the GUI but then the commands to load a new map don't do anything as far as I can tell. So the result is that I can't figure out how to experiment with my own maps.

Second question: I want to experiment with writing a maze walker that uses "raw" liar data to detect where it is between two walls of a maze, as an experiment in coding more complicated things. I thought that a simpler 2D simulator and Gui would be easer so I decided to try stdr. Am I picking the right tool?