Hi all

[kensanata]

Hi all

I had this forum in my bookmarks for quite a while but never did much until I got sent here to look for RobA's map tutorial.

I like to draw maps and scan them in. I've dabbled with drawing, scanning, and Gimp for a while, then I got interested in writing a program that would produce SVG output based on an ASCII map, realized that this was not going to work out, and then I decided to just use Inkscape as-is, going back to old maps and keeping grouped trees and hills as a little library of map elements. The reason being that I've had quite a lot of success using mixed Inkscape and scanned drawing maps in my current campaign.

Anyway, that's my mapping-introduction.

Now go and draw some maps.

[The Cartographist]

Welcome. Your stuff looks pretty nice - I think that you'll like it here.

[Redrobes]

Welcome, I like your hex mapper. I did one just like that for square grids. I was going to expand the number of tile types but never got around to it. Much like everything else I have on hold. I want multiple lives dammit !

Anyway - see you around & looking forward to seeing more or your maps.

[NeonKnight]

Welcome to the guild. Some interesting map styles there.

[ravells]

I really like your style! We have a tendency to overcomplicate with all the effects at our disposal and in my opinion you can't often beat a good black and white map.

Welcome to the Guild!

Looking at your map makes me think that we should really try designing a community based game....I should give it some thought.

[Steel General]

Welcome aboard!!!


(someone had to say it )

[kensanata]

Thank you all for the warm welcome!

@ravells: I must confess that I really like the kind of maps I see on popular products these days. Unfortunately these products are hard to print cheaply at home, and without a lot of whitespace they are also hard to customize and appropriate by players. Nothing's cooler than people drawing some arrows and noting the gods of temples or the name of shop owners they met in-game. A full color map looks nice but doesn't allow that.

That's why I think both map styles are needed. When I submitted my crude hand-drawn map to the War of the Burning Sky map contest, one person commented: "I would want to give Kensanata's map to the players the very first session." Eventhough my map got practically no votes, that comment made me really happy.

Finding tutorials to various strange and interesting map styles is what I'm hoping to find, here.

@Redrobes: Wow!! The similarity of our user interfaces is astonishing. The reason I discontinued my code was two-fold: 1. I realized that postprocessing was going to be necessary anyway because I wanted to add labels. 2. I realized that the input format looks nice in theory but that there's not enough data density: I can't specify enough different things per hex. And then I realized that using pregenerated hex paper and a set of cool grouped items in Inkscape worked just as well.

[Redrobes]

Wow!! The similarity of our user interfaces is astonishing....

Yes, scary ! I did mine just for the hell of trying to make a cgi form and upload test and I thought ummm what to upload. Aha ! The map is made purely as background colored DIV's. I was going to have some simple stuff like 'X' for pit, '$' for secret door '=' and 'H' for doors, you know. I mailed it about - EnWorld and WotC boards I think at the time but got very little response so archived it. Yes I think there are much better ways of doing these things. Inkscape should be prefect and anything that can snap pictures to a grid basically. There was some hex mapping icons and stuff posted a while back. I'll link here to a site index and look up hex. Next time I run that script I expect your other thread will be added to that.

Edit -- Ohh look Inkscape python script to make hex maps. How good is that !

[kensanata]

Edit -- Ohh look Inkscape python script to make hex maps. How good is that !

Indeed, it immediately caught my eye. And it works on my Inkscape 0.46 (Mac Mini), which is cool – except that the hexes don't actually seem to get a label. At the moment mkhexgrid still seems to be my best bet. Or I could investigate the bug in the plugin.