Incline Grid Cartographer - Best Tool for Drawing Classic RPG Maps

[naossano]

what change ?

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

[edit: updated stats]
Thanks for the 90+ yes votes so far, apparently we're in the top 30's of 2,551 software titles now

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=865153291

what change ?

They're retiring it by spring, to be replaced by "Steam Direct". The new system will be pay a fee (per title) to buy onto the service (rather than Greenlight which is a nominal fee paid to charity, submit then just wait for the inexorably accumulating votes). They're still undecided what the fee will be, but figures bandied about have been between the old $100 and significantly higher than that at $5,000.

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

Complete maps for Wizardry 2 + 3 are now available for Grid Cartographer v4.0.3b or later:
http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/tools/gridcart/download.php

These maps can be loaded when playing these games using Game Link to create a filled-in pseudo auto-map.

 

[Watser]

Do you need a complete map for Wizardry 1? I can send you mine

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

Do you need a complete map for Wizardry 1? I can send you mine

Yes, please

 

[FUDU]

Do you need a complete map for Wizardry 1? I can send you mine

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

Work hasn't stopped on GC404 while all this greenlight stuff is happening.

Today I added support for generic radio button message boxes. I used it to beef up the Floor > Clean (mop icon) command with a new 'remove all the colors from the floor' button.

Is there anything else you'd like to be able to remove from a floor in one fell swoop ?

 

[Watser]

I'm missing some feature where I am able to get a good overview of all the notes I've made without having to go through each region and floor manually. Can be really difficult to keep track of all the clues you've found.

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

I'm missing some feature where I am able to get a good overview of all the notes I've made without having to go through each region and floor manually. Can be really difficult to keep track of all the clues you've found.

I hope one day to add a kind of a "journal" mode or feature where you can have pages of global notes. Scaling this back from 'reimplement MS OneNote' to something with more manageable chunks is going to be tough. Certainly a 'show all the notes in the world in a big scrolling read-only list' might be a good start.

oh, btw I added your Wiz 1 map to the download page, thanks!:
http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/tools/gridcart/download.php

 

[Watser]

Issue with colouring, the original map has teleporter pairs in a distinct colour to tell them apart but in the one you uploaded it's all the same colour. Is that intentional?

I also have my M&M I+II maps, however they are quite outdated as they were made in ver 2 so nowhere near as pretty as my MM3 and WoX map

 

[caradryanx]

Hi David,

I am a gamer from Germany and really like what I have seen so far from your program Grid Cartographer. (especially in the video on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GulWGxjDGwU)

I have already played Eye of the Beholder 1 and 2 with The Allseeing Eye, but there is no support for Eye of the Beholder 3 yet. I really liked playing these old rpg classics with an automap. Drawing a map by myself I already tried in the past, but it is difficult playing without a current location marker. I always gave up at some point when dungeons became too complicated (teleport riddles and so on).

I am still interested in your program though, because you support more than the Eye of the Beholder games. But before purchasing, there are two features I really do miss in Grid Cartographer at direct comparison to All-Seeing-Eye:

- walls are always drawn, even if there is not actually a wall. This makes it difficult to find areas not yet explored.
- doors, buttons, levers, items, secret walls, pressure plates are not automatically drawn. That was really helpful to solve riddles in Eye of the Beholder, without resorting to a guide. This may be against the nature of Grid Cartographer, because you want to encourage drawing your own maps while playing. But cartographing is not my style, automapping is just so helpful.

Eye of the Beholder feels like a normally playable game with these perks, not some hardcore 90's rpg

And a very special request:
- support for Eye of the Beholder 3 I actually do not even want to try to play the third game without an automap. I heard that it is not a popular game, but I just like the style of the graphics and gameplay.

Hope to hear from you soon,

caradryanx

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

I really liked playing these old rpg classics with an automap. Drawing a map by myself I already tried in the past, but it is difficult playing without a current location marker. I always gave up at some point when dungeons became too complicated (teleport riddles and so on).

I am still interested in your program though, because you support more than the Eye of the Beholder games. But before purchasing, there are two features I really do miss in Grid Cartographer at direct comparison to All-Seeing-Eye

Hi caradryanx, firstly thanks for the kind words. Unfortunately, Grid Cartographer may not be ideal for you if you don't want to draw your own maps. The features I offer are all about assisting you doing this task manually.

If you liked All-Seeing-Eye and don't want to draw maps - then for other games I'd honestly recommend the Wizardry 6/7 auto-map mod and Gold Box Companion right now for their more comprehensive auto-mapping abilities.

I'm in too deep / too dumb to quit this project now so I guess it'll probably do better at it eventually but right now literal auto-mapping is neither the focus nor a particular strength of the project. Sorry!

Issue with colouring, the original map has teleporter pairs in a distinct colour to tell them apart but in the one you uploaded it's all the same colour. Is that intentional?

Nope, a silly mistake on my part - trigger happy with the new mop tool while trying to conform it to the other maps on offer. I've reapplied colouring for those teleporter pairs now and restored a few other bits that I broke. Hopefully it's a useful map again now! Thanks for letting me know

 

[Grauken]

Also manual mapping is part of the appeal, even if I occasionally like automapping in more action-based games

 

[caradryanx]

Ok, I guess I will have to accept your answer. Thanks for the quick reply though! Maybe I will have to learn proper cartographing.
What about the support for Eye of the Beholder 3?

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

Ok, I guess I will have to accept your answer. Thanks for the quick reply though! Maybe I will have to learn proper cartographing.
What about the support for Eye of the Beholder 3?

It's not easy - EotB3 doesn't work like the first two games and nailing down where the party position info is in memory is harder than most DOS games. I tried before and gave up, I'd like to crack it - I'm sure it can be done - but will take some effort and there always seems to be lower hanging fruit. I don't fully support EotB2 yet either - I should get onto that too.

 

[Watser]

Ok, I guess I will have to accept your answer. Thanks for the quick reply though! Maybe I will have to learn proper cartographing.
What about the support for Eye of the Beholder 3?

You can help with that! Play EotB3 yourself, map your progress and once you have completed the game and your map you can send it to Hidden Asbestos and he'll make a gamelink profile for it when he has time. That's how many of the supported games came to be.
EDIT: Ninja'd

 

[Joonas]

Don't want to spam this thread but since there's been discussion on EOB-mapping, here's a test version of an EOB3 automapper:
http://personal.inet.fi/koti/jhirvonen/ase3/

Currently it only shows walls and floors.

As Hidden Asbestos mentioned, EOB3 uses more modern memory management and things like the level map and party coordinates won't stay fixed in one location.

What I did for the party location is that I fetch the current location (x, y, facing, level) from the save file and search for it. For maps I extracted the level maps from the EYE.RES data file and use them for searching.

 

[caradryanx]

Hi Joonas,

thank you SO much for creating ASE3! Just genious, to fetch the party location from the save file at first.
I was finally able to beat EOB3 with it. It is actually no problem that doors and levers and so on are not written in the map display, the riddles are kind of much less complicated than in previous EOB games.
I can see why EOB3 is not as liked as the it predecessors, but it still is a fine game and holds up the classic dos rpg spirit.

 

[Leitz]

Fuck this thread and the shitty program. Stop developing it brethren. There is absoluely NO use for it. And if somebody disagrees: is there one game where there is no automap but also no appeal to make your own maps? Stop sucking dicks for nothing.

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

Grid Cartographer is a tool for drawing your own maps - digital graph paper. It's not a bolt-on auto-mapper. It has tracking features to help you with more subtlety. For some games you can (optionally) allow it to tell you where you are in the game, where you're facing and (if you want) it'll track where you've stepped. Don't like that - turn it all off and you've got a blank piece of graph paper with the same advantages that any other digital software offers over paper and crayons.

 

[FUDU]

Pay no attention to this retarded assburgers sufferer.

It's a great tool for old school RPG players. There is no doubt about that.

How's things coming along with greenlight?

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

How's things coming along with greenlight?

Thanks. It's going well, I think. #17 in the world atm. Valve seems to be fairly slow when it comes to adding new software so I'm not sure I'm close enough to the top of the pile to get through before they shut it down - we'll see. Certainly it was fun putting a video together and given Grid Cartographer a bit broader exposure, so its been worth it, whatever the outcome.

 

[FUDU]

Wow #17. That's impressive for such a short time. Looks like it should make it, before the close.

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

I setup a new Twitter account, specifically for Grid Cartographer updates and stuff: @gridcarto . It's driven a few more people to the greenlight page and I don't have to add 'In the next GC4 ...' to the start of my messages all the time

Right now I'm finishing up v4.0.4 by working on scripting features for the Pro Edition. To help me with that I've added a suitably retro looking console window. This is mainly useful to me as a way of assisting my development as it gives me somewhere nice to put error messages and suchlike. In future I expect I'll extend the console to add more technical features that might be of use to the interested user, but I don't intend for it to be a requirement - Grid Cartographer is meant to be user friendly and the graphical interface should be all you need to operate its core features.

 

[Hirato]

I setup a new Twitter account, specifically for Grid Cartographer updates and stuff: @gridcarto . It's driven a few more people to the greenlight page and I don't have to add 'In the next GC4 ...' to the start of my messages all the time

Right now I'm finishing up v4.0.4 by working on scripting features for the Pro Edition. To help me with that I've added a suitably retro looking console window. This is mainly useful to me as a way of assisting my development as it gives me somewhere nice to put error messages and suchlike. In future I expect I'll extend the console to add more technical features that might be of use to the interested user, but I don't intend for it to be a requirement - Grid Cartographer is meant to be user friendly and the graphical interface should be all you need to operate its core features.

Make it's background translucent, 70% opaque or 30% translucent is a value that works pretty well for my own console windows.

And what scripting language are you planning on using?
Python?
Lua?
Perl?
Sh/Bash?