Greetings From America
Posted: Sun May 13, 2018 8:58 am
Hello all,
I'd like to take a the time to thank you guys for making such an easy-to-use and user friendly program (minor exceptions barring). There's such easy customization and use that I was able to create part of my world map in about 9 hours! I probably would have been done sooner, but it was the very first map I went and made after fiddling with the different settings. I'm still learning more about the different features every time I use it.
I'm running a D&D campaign for 5e, and my players were super hyped when they saw it. I'm not nearly as good as the other people I've seen doing color maps, but that's because I actually haven't tried making a color map, yet.
This is the not-completed world map I made (everything was done in cartography, and I didn't know I could change the canvas color so easily, so I put my eyes through a bit of pain):
https://imgur.com/JbAJtfc
Here is basically a zoomed in continental view. It took me about 8 hours because I'm still familiarizing with the program, and I discovered a couple quirks with the software I'll mention below:
https://imgur.com/RgWy34h
This was me getting even further in-depth. I've begun working on the country maps for the entire continent. The program crashed on me about 3 hours in when I was nearly done, and, unfortunately, I forgot to save even once. I did encounter a couple more quirks as well:
https://imgur.com/pPF4i4X
EDIT: This is a country map after making several other maps.
So, the quirks I found are as follows:
1) When you try to copy/paste an object with Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V, the object pastes into the center of the map it seems. It makes it a bit tedious adding the extra couple clicks to paste it with the RMB.
2) When you paste an object off of a landmass, and then try to put it on the landmass to overlap/underlap other similar objects (such as mountains), the objects not initially placed on the landmass will always hold a higher layer priority, even if you "Send to Back".
3) I found that the roads and rivers, despite being originated in landmasses (so they'd "stick" to it) would not actually work as intended, so when I needed to move the rivers or roads along with the whole map, some would not transition.
4) I'm not sure if I wasn't doing something correctly, but I found that when Grouping objects of different types (Landmasses, cities, labels, rivers, roads, etc) you can't actually resize even with Proportions locked. I found I had to manually group the Landmasses, rivers, roads all together to stretch before I could select only the cities (and other graphical objects) and then finally labels. It was rather time consuming and inefficient.
5) There were no tropical tree types in the Vegetation or Expanded Vegetation categories, which bummed me a little because the party is in the country of Bulrog (which is basically the tropics).
All-in-all though, I love the program. The only real feature I found the need for is to resize everything when grouped together.
I'd like to take a the time to thank you guys for making such an easy-to-use and user friendly program (minor exceptions barring). There's such easy customization and use that I was able to create part of my world map in about 9 hours! I probably would have been done sooner, but it was the very first map I went and made after fiddling with the different settings. I'm still learning more about the different features every time I use it.
I'm running a D&D campaign for 5e, and my players were super hyped when they saw it. I'm not nearly as good as the other people I've seen doing color maps, but that's because I actually haven't tried making a color map, yet.
This is the not-completed world map I made (everything was done in cartography, and I didn't know I could change the canvas color so easily, so I put my eyes through a bit of pain):
https://imgur.com/JbAJtfc
Here is basically a zoomed in continental view. It took me about 8 hours because I'm still familiarizing with the program, and I discovered a couple quirks with the software I'll mention below:
https://imgur.com/RgWy34h
This was me getting even further in-depth. I've begun working on the country maps for the entire continent. The program crashed on me about 3 hours in when I was nearly done, and, unfortunately, I forgot to save even once. I did encounter a couple more quirks as well:
https://imgur.com/pPF4i4X
EDIT: This is a country map after making several other maps.
So, the quirks I found are as follows:
1) When you try to copy/paste an object with Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V, the object pastes into the center of the map it seems. It makes it a bit tedious adding the extra couple clicks to paste it with the RMB.
2) When you paste an object off of a landmass, and then try to put it on the landmass to overlap/underlap other similar objects (such as mountains), the objects not initially placed on the landmass will always hold a higher layer priority, even if you "Send to Back".
3) I found that the roads and rivers, despite being originated in landmasses (so they'd "stick" to it) would not actually work as intended, so when I needed to move the rivers or roads along with the whole map, some would not transition.
4) I'm not sure if I wasn't doing something correctly, but I found that when Grouping objects of different types (Landmasses, cities, labels, rivers, roads, etc) you can't actually resize even with Proportions locked. I found I had to manually group the Landmasses, rivers, roads all together to stretch before I could select only the cities (and other graphical objects) and then finally labels. It was rather time consuming and inefficient.
5) There were no tropical tree types in the Vegetation or Expanded Vegetation categories, which bummed me a little because the party is in the country of Bulrog (which is basically the tropics).
All-in-all though, I love the program. The only real feature I found the need for is to resize everything when grouped together.