Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Mapping Software?

I've brought up other web formats (like wikis), and in that post described some of the basic D&D "functions" you'd like an online campaign to do easily. These are from the point of view of a player, who wants to view the page, see both the current situation and the relevant past information (like his/her current character, as well as easy access to past conversations and encounters), and then describe his/her current actions.

One point that Jacob highlighted (and I agree with) is that "relevant past information" could be anything, and being able to store all the past history and search through it later is important.

I briefly mentioned the idea of interactive map software, which might be terribly complicated, but OpenRPG (for example) has a very nice one, and I would think there would be a lot "shared whiteboard" stuff out there. But the sharing isn't what I want to talk about at the moment.

I'm interested in hearing about good map-drawing applications. If I recall correctly, Scott uses Visio, which seems a little like using an elephant gun, but it certainly seems to work well. Unfortunately, not only do I not have Visio, I doubt it's available under Linux, which I much prefer to Windows (I don't have Windows at home at all).

I've done a little Googling, and some of the (Windows) software out there includes Dundjinni, Campaign Cartographer (which, to me anyway, looks ugly), and Campaign Suite, and that seems to be just scratching the surface. Here's some more links, in case you've got a yen to go surfing:

AutoREALM
GridSmith
TavernMaker

And those are just the ones with high-PageRank individual sites. The programs appearing in long lists of available software are innumerable: if I figure out how to put some sites on a blogroll, I'll put some aggregated sites there, just for reference.

I said I wasn't talking about whiteboardy stuff, but I'm breaking my own rule because this has the benefit of being OS-independent (and apparently does mappy stuff too).
Gametable
seems to do all the cool stuff OpenRPG does, only without a special client.

Do you know of other mapping tools? Got any experiences to share? I care about functional over pretty, although I draw the line at "illegible", and speedy development is most important of all; if it's easy to draw maps, we'll see a lot of them with lots of updates, and if it's a pain, we won't.

I did have bold plans of setting up a deme.org wiki-style faux campaign, just so we could take a look and try it out. I still have that plan, but it's too late and I have a big phone interview tomorrow.

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