Looking for software for frequently-updated town map

[Erich T. Wade]

I'm running a campaign right now in which the party has taken over an abandoned town and is in the process of rebuilding and adjusting it to suit their needs. To that end, I'd like to have a digital map that I can make frequent, sometimes substantial changes to as the campaign goes on, preferably mid-session. Does anyone here have experience with this sort of thing and have suggestions for which mapping tools might be best suited to the purpose?

[ravells]

Can you give us some sort of idea of what sort of detail your map will be drawn in and a before and after?

[Erich T. Wade]

Can you give us some sort of idea of what sort of detail your map will be drawn in and a before and after?

Sure. Right now I'm working off a quick-and-dirty town map I generated in (the free version of) Cityographer. It's good enough to start with, but not really what I need going forward: I'd like to diversify the buildings a bit more, for starters. The paid version might be able to do what I want - in the free version you can only use the baked-in art - but I'm not in a place where I can afford to buy new software right now, and in a month or so when I can I'd like to buy something that does what I need once rather than buy several different packages to try them out.

Original (scaled down to upload, master is 9927x10050px)
Edited to add: Actually, that looks way better than I expected after scaling it down so much.


Annotated, after most recent session, and I apologize for the horrible print/scan quality:

The large box labeled DIF is where the party is using Daern's Instant Fortresses to add a ton of new buildings, including roadwork. LF is a landing field. The small box is a preexisting city square that I didn't have a good way to add using Cityographer, and the line above it is where some street vendors are setting up semipermanent residence.

In short, what I need is:
* The ability to add and remove roads, buildings, walls, and other features as needed / on the fly. We game with a computer at the table, and it would be nice to have something that I can modify in real time. Needing a bit of downtime to work on the map is fine, but we sometimes game several times a week and sometimes we skip a few weeks of in-game time during a session.
* A variety of buildings. The ability to import new building icons as needed would suffice.
* The program needs to run on Windows 7.

Things that would be nice:
* A snap-to-road feature. I remember the old City Designer for CC2 had something like this, but it's been a decade since I've known where that key is.
* A building designer. I'm not a great artist, and being able to throw together a new building with some sort of tool would help.
* Distance measuring tools and maybe a toggleable grid.
* A consistent and visually appealing art style.
* Free, or a free version that will be functional enough until I can afford the full version.
* Exporting to png.
* Printing directly from the software.
* Any other features that improve the experience of urban mapping and/or running a campaign with the software.

I suspect that I could get most of what I need out of a project in something like Inkscape. However, I would much prefer software designed with mapping and gaming in mind that could automate at least some elements of the process. No matter what, my first order of business will probably be to import the old map as a background and reconstruct it in the new program, which will of course take time.

[ravells]

I don't know any free programmes dedicated to city building with the functionality you need, I'm afraid. It looks like the full version of Cityographer will give you all that you want (although not sure about .png export). You could check out Profantasy's city designer but you will need to pay for that.

best

Ravi

[johnvanvliet]

To that end, I'd like to have a digital map that I can make frequent, sometimes substantial changes to as the campaign goes on

there is Blender
it is a 3d suite

one of the things it can do is 2.5 d style rendering ( game engine) to full 3d


-- OLD posts and an OLD version of Blender

http://blenderartists.org/forum/show...-Suicidator%29

post 18 is an example
http://blenderartists.org/forum/show...=1#post1261554

http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials.../#.VKhl1VurvjZ

you can use a custom version of "openstreetmap" and use your own map and build it in blender

[markem]

I realize this is three years ago - but use Inkscape. Although it isn't made for building maps - it is really a very good program. The reason it is so good is because it uses Vector Graphics (like Illustrator, Visio, and other such programs). The reason it is important to use Vector Graphics is because you can draw it once and then group all of a drawing together and shrink the entire thing down to a pin point. So if you build an inn and you grouped all of the walls, floor covering, tables, beds, etc... together - then you can just grab a corner handle on the object and shrink it down. Then you can put THAT object onto your map where ever you wanto it to go. Then when it comes time to play the game you can open the map, select the building they are in, copy it to a new windows, expand it, and you are set. Inkscape also has layers. So you use layers like Ground, Floor, Walls, etc... Or you divide it even further into things like 1st-Floor-Ground, 2nd-Floor-Walls, and so forth. Then you can turn the various layers on or off to just look at those parts. Since Inkscape is free - I have people who are playing in my game use it and I send them Inkscape layouts so they can arrange their characters how they want them to be.

[wdmartin]

Markem - it's not three years ago. The first post in this thread dates to December 31, 2014 -- so not quite two months as of this writing.

Perhaps you were looking at the wrong date? The date of posting is listed in the dark brown bar at the top of the post. The date listed beneath the poster's name is the date that poster joined the forum.

[markem]

I have no idea why I thought it was three years old. Going senile I guess! :-P