Reply With QuoteWhat is Draw plus?
Yes, that would pretty much make for a great start for a borders reference!
What is Draw plus?
Drawplus is a vector / raster hybrid drawing program (mainly vector). It's made by Serif.
How does it compare with, say, Inkscape or Illustrator?
It's cheaper than illustrator (but more expensive than inkscape). The plus sides: Shallow learning curve, the interface works well with me. It's much faster than inkscape (IMO) and you can get some artistic results with. It has 'brushes' These are like photoshop brushes. but because they follow a vector line you can alter the path once you've drawn it by pulling nodes around. The downside to that is that it's a pretty memory/processor intensive process.
Most of my maps are drawn with Drawplus or a combo of PS and drawplus. I'd really recommend giving it or Xara Xtreme a try (Xara is a very similar product). It's got its quirks like anything and the latest version (which was coded from the ground up to allow for multi-core processing and 64bit operations - I think, not sure) is bug ridden as hell - and crashed pretty often but they have now released 2 patches which has helped the stability quite a bit although it's still not as stable as the previous version.
You can download a trial version free from their website.
Could you let us know when that newer version is more "bug free"? I wouldn't mind giving it a try....
Art Critic = Someone with the Eye of an Artist, Words of a Bard, and the Talent of a Rock.
Please take my critiques as someone who Wishes he had the Talent
Sure! I've been leaving some very surly comments on their forum about it all! It's not THAT bad, honestly. I'm using Drawplus x5 do do my latest city project (see the City WIP thread) and so far it has not crashed once - I'm very pleasantly surprised. Oh yes, it also opens GrumblingHive's City RPG SVG conversions very quickly. but whereas X4 allowed you to shift click multiple objects in a layer, X5 does not. This is not good news when there are hundreds or thousands of objects you want to copy to a new layer. I.e. separating the streets, houses trees etc onto their own layers.
Yeah. I am looking for ways to do just that (quickly). I just started a town map for the Challe4nge using GrumblingHive' Progs and came face to face with that prob....
Art Critic = Someone with the Eye of an Artist, Words of a Bard, and the Talent of a Rock.
Please take my critiques as someone who Wishes he had the Talent
@ korash - Which vector software do you use? If you can't do it with the stuff you have, I could make a special version of RPG2SVG that only outputs buildings, or only roads for you...
Right now i have Inkscape, but I am looking at all kinds of progs which I hope could do better at using my comp resources.....Inkscape keeps jamming up when It is only using about 15% of my memory or cpu....I am looking for a vector (possibly an hybrid) program that I can get for Windows 7 (64) for about the same price.
I do have a few questions about your prog though, Why are the roads and rivers broken up into different pieces? and do you know how to get nodes onto said roads and rivers once they are in Inkscape? I love what you have done with it, and I intend to keep using it
If you want, you can always think about those options for the next release
Last edited by Korash; 09-28-2012 at 06:23 PM.
Art Critic = Someone with the Eye of an Artist, Words of a Bard, and the Talent of a Rock.
Please take my critiques as someone who Wishes he had the Talent
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