Incline Grid Cartographer - Best Tool for Drawing Classic RPG Maps

[Hidden Asbestos]

Grid Cartographer v2.1.1 is now available http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/tools/gridcart/?aim=dl

This twelfth update of GC focuses on wrapping up some loose ends and fixing several bugs before version 3 development begins. As such it's the last update I have planned for the v2.x series (although I'm not discounting bug fix releases should something major crop up, so do report any issues you find). I'm very excited about v3 and hope to start revealing further information about it soon!

I also just want to add a big thank you to everyone who has supported this project in any way since I released it all the way back in June 2013 to today and beyond. Thanks!

Does that mean the multiplication of indie grid based RPG ?

I have no idea!

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

I've started a v3 development log here: http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=1346

Follow along and feel free to ask questions! Now's a great time to make requests

 

[KazikluBey]

Hexes. Neat. Also, downloaded this to my Galaxy Note 4; it works pretty well. The interface is a tad small, but hey, input precision is what the stylus is for.

 

[mindx2]

Hidden Asbestos Can't wait for your next release! Can't tell you how many hours I've spent just playing around with the program, not to mention using it mapping some good ol' games...

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

Hexes. Neat.

Yeah, it'll be cool to have. Although I'll be honest and say it's a bit daunting right now - but I'll break it down into manageable tasks over the coming weeks. Should bring in some more tabletop players doing this.

Also, downloaded this to my Galaxy Note 4; it works pretty well. The interface is a tad small, but hey, input precision is what the stylus is for.

One thing you might like to do is go to Options > Interface and at the bottom there's a checkbox to enable high density mode. This will double up the size of the interface. Although it may well be enabled already with a 500ppi screen.

Hidden Asbestos Can't wait for your next release! Can't tell you how many hours I've spent just playing around with the program, not to mention using it mapping some good ol' games...

Thanks man, hope I don't disappoint!

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

I do understand that this will have limited use to cRPG mapping, but here's the first shot of hexagons in GC3 all the same:

Big version here: http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=1346#p1683

 

[FUDU]

Sweet.

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

New in v3 when you draw a wall or door you can hold down the <SHIFT> key and drawing will be locked into the drawing direction. This allows you to draw straight edges without being so demanding on mouse accuracy. This works for edges and block walls and doors horizontally, vertically or diagonally.

 

[Palikka]

Would it be possible to have the label tool place each letter on it's own tile? Doing crossword puzzles would be much easier.

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

Added a few more things to v3 this weekend that might be interesting / useful to cRPGs:

* "RMB eraser" - you can setup the right mouse button to work as a quick-access eraser.
* "No ground floor" - for games that use the US convention (or so wikipedia tells me) of floor 1 being at street level you can now create maps that omit the ground floor and descend straight into basement 1.
* "Per-region grid setup" - games like Might and Magic which have a large overworld map and several smaller dungeon maps can now benefit from region independent grid setups.

More hexes this week and if that, and testing, goes well I'll be looking at releasing v3.0 into the wild shortly after that. That's the plan anyway ;-)

Would it be possible to have the label tool place each letter on it's own tile? Doing crossword puzzles would be much easier.

It's possible I'll be revisiting the note system during the lifetime of v3 and I'll bear this in mind. Certainly a bit of an unexpected use case, but cool none-the-less.


edit: Forgot to mention I'm currently trying to confirm whether Android version 2.1.1 crashes on an Nvidia Shield Tablet (running the Lollipop update) if you go to File > Open (as reported on my forum). Any help with confirming this would be much appreciated!

 

[Abelian]

Firstly, thank you for developing such a intuitive, versatile and well-designed application.

Here are some suggestions, in no particular order:
- include a "no magic area" effect, similar to darkness, so that other icons can be placed on top, preferably something that can be stacked with darkness as well
- for the Axis Value Settings under the Setup tab, I would appreciate the ability to have the row and column counters displayed for every major tile, not just along the X and Y axes
- add a color chooser for the brushes (ex. I wanted to use a darker shade of green and blue)
- I had a hard time finding the Note Tool, since I didn't think of clicking the application logo in the top left corner of the UI; I was looking under the Label, Edit and View tabs

A issue I noticed is that Grid Cartographer crashes when I run DOSBox in fullscreen mode.

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

Here's the v3 release date and pricing announcement post: http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=1346&start=10#p1710

 

[Watser]

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

Tah-dah! Version 3 is now available: http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/tools/gridcart/

Main highlights of this third major release:

* HEXAGONS!
* Completely rewritten Mark Tool and new Paint Selection tool. Add and remove multiple areas to make complex selections. (Watch this animation for a demo.)
* More Colours and Coloured Labels
* Constrained Drawing on square grids by holding down the <shift> key.
* Optional "Ground Floor"

enjoy!

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

If there's anyone having tried this on a Mac and got a crash in the file open/save dialogs, please take a look at v3.0.0c as I think I've fixed it. Seems to only affect Macs that aren't a mac mini which is a bit of a pain but hey, that's half the fun of software development. Anyway, download link is here, good luck:
http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/tools/gridcart/files/grid_cartographer_v3_0_0c.zip

 

[bussinrounds]

If there's anyone having tried this on a Mac and got a crash in the file open/save dialogs, please take a look at v3.0.0c as I think I've fixed it. Seems to only affect Macs that aren't a mac mini which is a bit of a pain but hey, that's half the fun of software development. Anyway, download link is here, good luck:
http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/tools/gridcart/files/grid_cartographer_v3_0_0c.zip

It works now. Updates look great !

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

You can't please all of the people, all of the time. So I've been working on a keyboard shortcut editor

Read some more about it here:
http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=1346&start=30#p1739

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

I'm still working on the free v3.0.1 update for Grid Cartographer. The input remapping is almost completely finished now, fingers crossed it's flexible enough for everyone.

So, today was spent drawing and adding more marker tiles to better express what you've found in your dungeons.

The image above shows them in place. The full list is:

• Arrows
• Gem Stones: Crystal, Diamond, Emerald, Ruby
• Map item
• Purse
• Sack
• Simple Shapes (Triangle, Square, Circle)
• Covered Pit
• Trapped Pit (ie. filled with spikes instead of just a hole)
• Well

Also added a new filter to the new 'Dungeon Master Tools' image export filters to cover pits (instead of just hide them.) when you make 'player maps' as a tabletop DM.

I hope these will be useful. Feel free to suggest more, although it'll be for the version after since I'll be moving onto some new wall / door types next and I'll really want to release it after that

 

[Sceptic]

I tried out the demo version of the software. It's actually pretty good. I'm still biased to using pen and graph paper for my old-school CRPG mapping, but using a digital software would be much better for something like an LP than scanning my borderline-illegible chicken scrawlings. I do have one major question about GC, which I couldn't test in the demo version (since there's only one "special" tile, Darkness): can you place multiple specials on the same tile, like say spinner, Darkness and antimagic, and how would that look (I only see one-special-per-tile examples on the various example images on the website)? Can I make my own specials with the pro version? I guess the latter doesn't matter as much, especially with all the shapes you're adding; if these can be combined together and with the specials, I can just assign shapes to whatever custom specials that software doesn't natively support.

From what I've seen of the demo the product is really cool and quite powerful. If you can combine specials then it'd be much, much MUCH better than using Excel for mapping; the clunkiness of doing that is what's made me stick to my paper maps. Good work all in all. Now answer my questions and convince me to buy it

 

[Sceptic]

Oh and I know a bunch of Codexers are using this, we should totally make a database of old-blobber maps made with this.

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

I tried out the demo version of the software. It's actually pretty good. I'm still biased to using pen and graph paper for my old-school CRPG mapping, but using a digital software would be much better for something like an LP than scanning my borderline-illegible chicken scrawlings. I do have one major question about GC, which I couldn't test in the demo version (since there's only one "special" tile, Darkness): can you place multiple specials on the same tile, like say spinner, Darkness and antimagic, and how would that look (I only see one-special-per-tile examples on the various example images on the website)? Can I make my own specials with the pro version? I guess the latter doesn't matter as much, especially with all the shapes you're adding; if these can be combined together and with the specials, I can just assign shapes to whatever custom specials that software doesn't natively support.

From what I've seen of the demo the product is really cool and quite powerful. If you can combine specials then it'd be much, much MUCH better than using Excel for mapping; the clunkiness of doing that is what's made me stick to my paper maps. Good work all in all. Now answer my questions and convince me to buy it

Hi, thanks very much for the kind words and taking the time to check out Grid Cartographer.

To answer your question ( ) the way I draw a tile body is a composite, from bottom to top, of a terrain layer, marker layer and an effects overlay. The terrain is grass and what-not (more intended for pen&paper RPers) then you have the marker layer where you can put, to use your example a spinner (the full complement, soon to be expanded, is shown here: http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/tools/gridcart/?aim=upgr if you scroll down and click the 'show gallery' button). Finally, the effects overlay is drawn with a semi-transparent black square over the tile. This is presently limited to the one you've already seen 'darkness'. While you can add your own custom markers and terrain - this single effect layer is the current limit of what GC v3.0.0 offers in both free and pro editions.

I'd be more than happy to expand this to include an 'anti-magic' effect using a different form of overlay or marker. I understand this is quite important for The Bard's Tale games. My problem, and I'd love to get yours and other's feedback on this, is how to answer the following three main questions (plus the logical follow-ups):

1. What should the anti-magic effect look like? is there a precedent? (perhaps a red transparency? is this clear?)
2. What should a dark, anti-magic tile look like? a split 50/50 pair of dark and red triangles? would that look crap? does the answer to 1 make this a non-issue (if it were some kind of pip or background shading)? do you simply ignore the darkness part?
3. Are there other popular effect types that aren't represented and might be required later (anti-gravity or something) that have an effect on the two points above?

This is definitely a thing I'm willing to work on, but not something I feel confident on how to solve the "right way".

 

[Sceptic]

Thanks for the detailed explanation of how things work.

I did see the web page you linked and the full complement of marker layers and effects overlays available in the pro edition, and it's a pretty good list. Because the free version doesn't have effects other than Dark I wasn't sure what a combination would look, but I could say decide to use the pentagram to indicate antimagic, and then if a Dark+antimagic square looks like the darker layer with a pentagram on top of it then that works great. Of course, the problem would then become if I want to denote a dark+antimagic+spinner square... The thing with Bard's Tale (have you been reading posts in that thread, or did we just happen to both be thinking about the same game?) is that these kinds of combinations occur very frequently, especially in BT2, and it's a big part of what makes mapping the fun challenge that it is, and from what I understand you can't have both the pentagram and the circle-spinner icon on the same square, can you?

In that case, a different layer colour like you suggested would work. Red I think would be fine. I wouldn't split the tile 50/50, but instead create some kind of shading. Say red is antimagic, blue is a silence (there's a lot of these in BT3). If the antimagic tile is in a darkness zone, then you get a red tile with a shading runing through it (some dotting maybe? a darker red?). If it's antimagic+silence then it's a purple tile, combining both colours. If it's all 3 and a spinner then it's a purple, dotted/shaded tile, with the current "rotating room" marker. The nice thing about the coloured layers is that you don't really even need to specify what they should be in-software, this can be entirely left to the gamer/mapper, who can assign whatever he wants to a colour based on what obstacles the game has (antimagic, silence, antigravity, HP or SP leech or regeneration... whatever). And with colours like this they can be combined easily with existing markers and layers, like the darkness, the spinner, the skull, the stairs, and so on, since if I understand the markers and the effect overlay for darkness (and potentially for whatever other colours) are completely separate from each other.

I think this answers all 3 questions you raised? I don't know if this is the right way or how feasible it would be for you to implement, or even if it's worth your time and effort. Just throwing some ideas in the hope they can help.

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

Okay, that's really helpful! Just a coincidence that I mentioned BT - I don't know those games very well but they have come up in the past and stuck with me as particularly complex challenges for the mapper / software.

I think I quite like the idea of generic red / green / blue overlays as that puts a cap on it without enforcing a particular game. I think I can find a way to render a mix of three colours over a square or hex that can also be darker in places. I'll post back when I have something to show

Thanks for talking this through with me!

 

[Sceptic]

Thank you for being so willing to consider and discuss suggestions. If more software developers were like this the world would be a better place

 

[Hidden Asbestos]

Forgive the rather abstract demonstration, but I think these new 'field effects' work rather well.

Even when you reach the pathological case of trying to map some kind of hellscape tile (dark with three simultaneous effects - is there an 80's game so cruel?) it seems to do okay.
The only downside I can see to this generic system is that it puts the onus on the player to invent meaning for them, but I think that's okay as you could add a label / note somewhere about it.

It's all gone in rather easily (just need to make icons for the brush palette) and so that'll be part of v3.0.1 as well

Seem okay to everyone?

Thank you for being so willing to consider and discuss suggestions. If more software developers were like this the world would be a better place

Happy to help.