Reply With QuoteAfter a lot of consideration I've decided to give a chance to the combo FM8+AS3. If I don't like it, I'll try MapForge or CC3+.
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It was supposed to be things.Originally Posted by Mark Oliva
It's one of the issues of having SwiftKey configured to work on multiple languages, it takes just a random wrong swipe with your thumb to inadvertently change which language the spellchecker will use.
Part of my daily work is to develop applications and simulations so my programming skills are still sharp. I'm also used to develop add-ons, plug-ins and tools for AutoCAD/Revit, so I know more or less how to handle creating a new tool to perform some desirable graphical output.
What I don't know is how these mapping software handle these things. Since I don't know how the software works, I can't develop a script to do/automate it.
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After a lot of consideration I've decided to give a chance to the combo FM8+AS3. If I don't like it, I'll try MapForge or CC3+.
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OK. That clears that up!
I'm not sure want you want to automate. There are drawing tools in CC3+ that are quite easy to make. They don't involve coding. There's a PDF book by Remy Monsen in Norway (written in English) that gives complete instruction in how to do this and almost anything else that one can do with CC3+. You can buy it from ProFantasy. The macro programming language also is included.What I don't know is how these mapping software handle these things. Since I don't know how the software works, I can't develop a script to do/automate it.
Any kind of tool that one would use in FM8 already is built in, as far as my imagination can conceive of things. If you have some ideas in mind for specific tools, tell me what you need to know. (I know FM8 pretty thoroughly. I wrote one of the two manuals for it.)
If you want to learn the secrets of making MapForgre add-ons, I'm afraid you'll have to pry those secrets out of Heruca.
That route certainly should bring you to the best possible result.After a lot of consideration I've decided to give a chance to the combo FM8+AS3. If I don't like it, I'll try MapForge or CC3+.
Mark Oliva
The Vintyri (TM) Project
I was thinking about something very similar to Smart Building Tool on FM8, but making random sci-fi buildings for city maps.
Obviously the easiest way would use the AutoCAD approach and create a library of buildings and adding it randomly on the map by hand, but this way, but what I've found interesting in the Smart Building Tool was that it implement random variations on the buildings and sometimes is even able adapt its design to the designated boundaries.
In the end my idea is to implement random variation of the geometry of the buildings and the elements on the rooftops and avoid the "feeling" that it is just a few buildings that were cut'n'pasted gazillion times over.
In the NBOS forum, @Ed_NBOS suggested that flat roofed buildings could be easily created with Polypath Tool, I didn't have time to test it.
If I were doing medieval fantasy maps I could certainly agree that FM8 and CC3+ probably have far more tools than anyone could possibly hope using.
But if you're mapping anything not related to medieval fantasy, things are not easy. Not only the programs offer less tools, but a some of the most interesting tools are not usable on other contexts.
Even looking at the stuff running around the Internet, be it paid or free, you'll find that there aren't that much to look for and you'll notice that most of the stuff you find most of then are duplicated instance of the Dubdjini Archive content.
I know a few people doing beautiful sci-fi maps and deckplans, most of them do most of the art from scratch, using very few things from internet content. Unfortunately what they all have in common is that they have far more available free time for doing their maps and more artistic skills than me.
But let me just dig into FM8 for a few months and see how hard is to make sci-fi stuff with it.
I liked AS3 a lot, despite sometimes it being a little quirky, I've even started to use it to map/log my astronomical observation.
FM8 seems to be very straight forward, but I didn't dig deeply into it, but I already noticed the immense assimetry between the amount of medieval fantasy content compared to content for other types of settings.
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Last edited by nichendrix; 02-13-2019 at 03:52 PM.
My question about futuristic city maps was an attempt to see if folks could describe a "futuristic city" or give examples of it. When I look for "futuristic city" images online, some folks gravitate towards "blue-and-white asymmetric utopia towers", others are more into "anything rounded and with lots of domes", others to go with the black-and-brown boxy Blade Runner dystopia, some are solidly in the "mirrored and metallic everything", while some folks call any cityscape that's a mish-mash of different time periods with a giant box growing out of the middle "futuristic". There is a good bit of "futuristic city" art, but not a whole lot of maps. Ah well. I'll keep looking.
Sincerely, I've never seem a Futuristic City maps aside from the works of a few guys scattered around the Star Wars RPG communities who from time to time do some city mapping. Outside this small niche I've never seem any maps.
On the what's a futuristic city look like, the SW Universe is probably the best place to look at it, since there are all the styles you mention plus some other possible designs. Other sci-fi settings usualky concentrate on way smaller scenery.
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I think the sheer size and complexity (infrastructures) of futuristic cities is the main reason why there aren't that many maps.
Think about it. A 10 000 people city is quite big for a classic medieval fantasy setting but that's about 1000 building (give or take).
For a modern of futuristic setting, 10 000 people just a common town/outpost.
Imagine you wanted to map a modern city like Paris or New York, we're talking about millions of people, thousand and thousand of buildings...
At this point most people would rather have an abstract representation of the city than individual buildings.
You could still map only portion of the city if that counts.
My Deviantart: https://vincent--l.deviantart.com/
If you're mapping a place with high population density you're right. But most sci-fi stuff don't usually happens in this kind of place.
If you look at Star Trek, Star Wars and so on, the average population of most planets is on the range from a few hundred thousand to a few million inhabitants on average for the whole planet, most planet capitals don't go over 10,000-100,000 inhabitants.
For example in Star Wars galaxy, most planets' populations would fall between Tatooine (Population:80,000) in the backwater nearly untamed frontier planet and Naboo (Population: 4.5 billion) the average affluent higher population density planet.
Only about 5% of the galaxy's planets have with population of over 1 billion inhabitants with most planets' population ranging between 2 million to 200 million inhabitants. In this kind of low population density environment each planet would have only handful of cities with population over 100,000 inhabitants.
Certainly in SW Galaxy there are a few off the charts planets like Coruscant with its trillions of inhabitants and the whole surface covered with skyscrapers thousands of stories high that are actually so tall that it's star's light never touches its surface, but they are the exception among the exceptions.
Most RPG adventures would take place on these ultra densely populated places, so mapping them isn't really an issue. And in the few occasions where mapping this kind of place is necessary, you would just map the area of interest, not the whole planet.
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for whole planets you can also use Blender ,as i do.
Screenshot_20190214_002238.png
a very small example ( 2048x1024 px )
texture and HeightMap
EarthLike2.Tex.png 2k.height.png
and Blender is opensource so it is FREE
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I tend to think that using Blender, 3DS Max or Maya to make RPG maps that would be used once or twice on campaign is kind of using a bazooka to kill a fly. In the end I ended up buying FM8 and AstroSynthesis 3, which could generate the same kind of output with just a few clicks, which is handy, since entire world maps would be just the texture of surface with markers for a few dozen locations of interest, at least for RPG purpose.
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