Gaming Geek

[bcholmes]

So, fuelled by Firefox's ability to render SVG, I've been playing with the capabilities of Inkscape, an amazingly powerful open source SVG editor. I love some of the good ideas that they've had with the editor. So what have I been doing with it? I've been drawing RPG maps. Geek, geek.

For inspiration, I recently paid real money for a tool called Campaign Cartographer Pro 2. CC2 is probably the only really successful RPG mapping software. You can, ferinstance, find web pages with CC2 maps that you can download. I'm told that under the covers, CC2 is using CAD, and I've never really used CAD before. Someone on an online forum said, "I will admit that CC2 has more of a learning cliff than a learning curve." And, man, they're right. The tool is fucking unusable.

So what I find myself doing is taking a lot of drawing elements and tracing them Inkscape to give me nice SVG implementations. CC2 uses line drawings, and SVG uses line drawings. Seems simple enough. What I find interesting about this exercise is that it gives me an interesting insight into what makes a line drawing really work. Colour noise. Shadow. Occassional imperfections in the linework. Interesting insight into drawing.

I'll also make a brief mention of another tool (which I don't own, but which impresses me): Dundjinni, which produces some amazingly photo-realistic maps.