Mapping

Summary:

How do you map? Software (automapper or drawing), pen and paper or is it all in your head? My main goal with this tread is to get an overview over software I can use, and peoples experience with these.

Mapping

Betula 09 Feb 2009 08:23

Up until now, all my maps has been in my head and fingers. But as I love to just look at maps (plus my aging memory is getting slippery), I would like to know what kind of mapping system you guys use? I've tried the Zmapper for automapping, but it wasn't really satisfying. Zebra uses dia, which looks nice, but I still haven't gotten around to use it.

Is there any other suggestions and experiences out there? Can I bug you to write a bit about your favourite mapping system?

Last edited on 09 Feb 2009 11:35 by Betula Show more

Re: Mapping

zebra 09 Feb 2009 10:36

I use Dia to map, it is actually presentation software (like microsoft visio).

Dia is a gnome project, running on GTK code so it runs on all platforms, I run this on my windows machine at work, and on linux at home.

To be honest, it is not meant to be used for this purpose and can be a little cumbersome to make maps with. It is not automatic like e.g. Zmud's automapper. You will have to draw all rooms and connections by hand but after a little practice it works quite well.

See image on the right for an example of the result, drelexor castle. This is an export to a .png file, it exports to almost every imagetype you can imagine.

It uses quite a lot of memory if you draw big maps, I wanted to have one file for the whole mud but on my workmachine this is not workable (1Gb RAM in my machine, with other programs running) but for partial maps (up to the size of Manetheren) it is very workable.

//Z