Looking for an alternative mapping software

[Devilin]

Well the map making tiles I use to make the city maps for my games recommends tiled. But I ran into a pretty significant problem when I tried to mix buildings and trees together. Tiled bases which object comes to the front based on which object has the greatest potion of itself being overlapped. Instead of just first come first served. Which you can imagine makes it, not doable. So I need an alternative mapping program. I tried looking through your big list of programs, but its so badly out of date that combined with my limited knowledge of the jargon, leaves me feeling helpless. Help please?

[Redrobes]

Yeah this is a bit of a problem when you design some mapping software. The issue is that either you let the user control the Z order but that is REALLY tedious especially if you insert an extra tile into an already packed list. So generally you need to come up with some heuristic about how to order them. Trees are a particular problem because usually they are large but generally small stuff sits _underneath_ them which is unlike most stuff which tends to form a pile like a pyramid. You should ask the dev if there is a workaround becuase you may find that if you use a large tile where the tree only forms a little part of it and most is transparent then when you overlap most of the tree its only a little bit of the whole tile and so still works ok. I could only absolutely tell you how to do this on my own program so ask the dev. They often like feedback !

[Wayne Ligon]

I would also like to find a good piece of mapping software. Since Campaign Cartographer can now use a large chunk of Natural Earth data, and that's a very strong case for buying it but...frack, they are really proud of something that as far as I know hasn't seen a lot of additional development in several years. Is there anything, anything at all that lets you modify the native ESRI data is already comes in? Every GIS program I've ever seen allows you to do almost everything EXCEPT make modifications to things like coastlines, terrain, etc, etc.

[johnvanvliet]

anything at all that lets you modify the native ESRI data is already comes in?

for reading esri database folders ( files)
gdal and qgis

for writing esri files
ArcGis -- buy it
it is there own format and they managed to do what Microsoft did not
make a closed source propriety STANDARD

i use geo-tiff or gdal's virtual format

[waldronate]

Campaign Cartographer can read and write DXF files. GDAL can translate ESRI files to and from DXF.