Mapping software for modules

[Tweeker]

Hello,
I have been working on an adventure, but I need to make a town map. Can anyone tell me what program the town maps in The chaotic caves where made in? Or the wilderness maps in Morgansfort?

[nemolomen]

I'm curious about this as well.

I believe the "Western Lands" hex map was made in either Hexographer or Worldographer, which I started looking into yesterday.

Not sure about the town map or the Morgansfort "surroundings" map.

[Dimirag]

I think its used on several maps here

On the Tools section you have the MapMatic tool.

[Solomoriah]

I created the wilderness maps from BF1 Morgansfort in Gimp, the hard way. Early maps like those in Morgansfort were done in Gimp, but later I wrote MapMatic to make them easier (for me anyway) and consistent.

[Tweeker]

In the short term I plan to lay the town, and a few other locations out on graph paper. I'll see what I can come up with for mapping software. The big problem seems to be that most most of the mapping programs are designed for color maps. Most of the tiles sets do not convert cleanly to B&W. So the tiles need re-colored.

For the overland map I am using an ancient program, AKS. I am using this primarily because the tile look very old school authentic, however the don't convert to B&W well. I converted the tiles to B&W manually, here is a sample. I think the grassland and lake tiles still needs some work.

[nemolomen]

I like that map, its a little hard to look at but I like it.

I think the issue with with the tiles is more than "recoloring" though. It looks more like they'll need to be converted to 2-tone (IE: B&W) rather than dithered greyscale, which is what it looks like your conversion produced, though I could be totally wrong.

Or, since AKS appears to have the ability to easily swap out hex sets, maybe a new hex set purposely made in B&W is what is needed. Some could be white on black and others could be black on white and for things where gray (IE: patterned) is needed, just put in the individual pixels in the required array (xy distances between pixels).

This is something I might be interested in working on, time permitting of course, but I'm not ready to make that commitment just yet.

[Tweeker]

Thanks for the feed back, It is good to hear your opinion on the map.
Ideally it would be a color map, but I understand the publishing constraints.

The conversion wasn't so much dithering as converting the color tiles to black and white overlays, and then adding a monochrome background. I wanted the map to shift from lighter greys to darker colors as the altitude an difficulty of the terrain increased. So you have lowlands, swamps and grass lands as mostly white, then hills and forests, followed by foot hills, and finally 3 different kinds of mountains. I want it to be clear that the town exists on a road that must go thru the mountain pass to the north west. I am less sure that that would come across on a black and white map. However I am willing to try if you think it would be more ascetically pleasing.

[Solomoriah]

I try to avoid grays in anything that will go to print, as I've found print-on-demand vendors vary a lot in their gray reproduction. That's why none of our tables use alternating gray bars.

[Tweeker]

I try to avoid grays in anything that will go to print, as I've found print-on-demand vendors vary a lot in their gray reproduction. That's why none of our tables use alternating gray bars.

Good to know, I reworked it a bit to remove most of the greys, it is stil not completely B&W. for example the single mountain and tree still have alot of grey on them, I may end up having to remove one of the 3 mountain icons.

How do the new grassland icons look?

[orobouros]

I've actually found inkscape to work surprisingly well for hex maps. It's a vector editing program so everything looks crisp at all scales.