Favorite Mapping Apps/Files

[Doombringer]

I was wondering what the communities favorite means of doing maps for their games is. Up till now my maps have always been hand drawn, and often only sufficient for in game reference as I used a mat for drawing dungeons, and generally simply described locations.

I've been considering ProFantasy's software, but I have to admit I am slightly daunted at eventually getting so into it that I have bought 500 dollars of software for it.

[Foen]

I have the ProFantasy software and must say I find it very hard to use (though it does create good-looking results if you have the patience to learn it).

As mentioned elsewhere, I am a bit of a luddite and have reverted to PowerPoint (*hangs head in shame*).

Cheers

Stuart

[nezzir]

Try Dundjinni then, it's a lot cheaper and has some great community support (lots of art).

I'm a bit of a Pro-Fantasy biggot myself. The newest version even has .png support, so all the art from the Dundjinni community (which is awesome, did I say that already?), works with it as well.

[Doombringer]

i tried the Djudinni demo and was sadly disapointed. The first and biggest issue I had was when I clicked to draw, drag a tile, whatever, it would not start where I clicked but down and to the right. It annoyed me enough I did not bother figuring out any more than that.

I have photoshop and illustrator, I have been thinking of seeing what I can do with those.

[RiverRat]

Dunjinni is an excellant program that can produce beautiful results. That being said I found the interface oversimplified and counterintuitive. The community support is awesome (like nezzir said).

I find that CC3 is easier for me to use. The reason being it is a CAD based program, which is what I use all day. The learning curve is a bit steep, esp if you aren't familiar with how it is supposed to work. The results are excellent once you get the hang of it.

Just my .02

RR
(lurking less) :D

[Mellock]

Photoshop (...or gimpshop) for me for now. I've kind of been eyeing Fractal Mapper, which also seems to support PNG files, but doesn't have layers. I have Dundjinni, but I dislike working with it.

[Griogre]

You can also find some pretty good tile mappers out there to build decent maps pretty quickly (but with less variety) and there are a fair amount of good random map generators available on the web.

Probably you need to decide how much time you want to devote to map making and choose a mapper accordingly. There really are a ton of different ones out there.

It sounds like you want prettier than hand drawn but still fast to make maps.

[Asgorath]

I use Profantasy software for all mapping.

[Xorn]

www.dungeonforge.com

There's DungeonForge & MapX. Both are completely free--DungeonForge is very simple to use, but kind of limited. MapX is quite complicated, but pretty powerful. I use MapX myself, I even put all the tiles from Dream Weaved Worlds into a tileset and now I can place them with nice snap-to options.

I drew the entire Sunless Citadel without too much trouble, and that video tutorial out there for CC3, I watched it and was able to make the same map (not quite as well shaded and such, but still very nice looking) he did in the same amount of time. Anyway, for a free program, it's hard to beat, just read the tutorials in the download section.

Note that the developer is combining the ease of use of DF with the power and flexibility of MapX. That will be free when he finishes.

Also, don't sell Dungeon Tiles Mapper short. It's on the D&D site, but just use their link to find the author's site, he has a better version up there, which makes some pretty nifty battlemaps. (Although I'm in the process of taking all the DungeonTiles and putting them into MapX. What can I say, I like MapX.)

If I was made of money though, I'd use ProFantasy's stuff. The maps you can make are pretty breathtaking.

[Master]

I use Autocadd, PSP, Photoshop, Illustrator and several 3d modeling programs to make maps/pictures etc.

If you need a nice free paint program though you can use GIMP.

https://www.gimp.org/

[Griogre]

Another nice free paint program closer to Photoshop is Paint.NET at https://www.getpaint.net/index.html . I use to use GIMP but switched to Paint.NET because I liked the interface better and didn't really need the extra power GIMP has to just make maps.

[NineShadowEyes]

Dungeon Crafter 1.4.1. Free. Nice and easy.

[Griogre]

Yeah, I also still use Dungeon Crafter 1.4.1. The ability to add your own tiles keeps this software viable. I've had a bunch of Skeleton Key Game tiles (https://www.rpgnow.com/index.php?filters=0_0_0&manufacturers_id=80) for face to face games and suddenly realized I with a bit work I could use the tiles in Dungeon Crafter and make maps for use in FG. Here are some examples:

Map in an old FG1 game:
https://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m222/Griogre/MineLow.png
The map tiles here weren't pretty as I wasn't real careful when I make them because I just made a few in a hurry to see how they looked. Later I went back and cleaned up the seams.

Using DC messing with the free sample tiles from Snikle's Tile Map set (https://fouruglymonsters.com/onlinestore/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2&products_id=39) at Four Ugly Monsters:
https://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m222/Griogre/ACS.png


A DC map made with some tiles posted here on the forums (Note this pic was of the beta tiles, the final ones are better):
https://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m222/Griogre/BM3.png

[Xorn]

That's the same DungeonCrafter from www.dungeonforge.com, right?

DungeonForge is the sequel to DungeonCrafter, and MapX is the "sidegrade" to DungeonForge. Dungeonforge is incredibly easy to use, like DC is, while MapX is more complex, but lets you make round/fractal rooms and such. No Undo feature in MapX, you have to select what you just drew and delete it. Really wish it had Undo.

Still, I think both are great programs, when you consider they are free.

[robocoastie]

i tried the Djudinni demo and was sadly disapointed. The first and biggest issue I had was when I clicked to draw, drag a tile, whatever, it would not start where I clicked but down and to the right. It annoyed me enough I did not bother figuring out any more than that.

I have photoshop and illustrator, I have been thinking of seeing what I can do with those.

the problem you describe has to do with java. You have to downgrade your Java. Dj* are still working on an update to fix that. Until then, downgrade your java and try to keep it from auto-updating itself.

[Griogre]

That's the same DungeonCrafter from www.dungeonforge.com, right?

I think so. You would have to look at the version number to tell. Dungeon Forge is OK. I haven't look at it in a while though.