I've got a ton of ideas in my head for the world I'm creating, but I'd really like to see it on paper (or, in pixels I guess) as well - so I thought it would be nice to look into making a map of some kind. Doesn't have to be anything fancy.
My first thought was to make one myself, so a quick search turned up a program that looked like it would work: Hexographer. With this you can make your won hex maps. Since it's free (though there is an upgraded paid version) I thought I'd give it a try. This is the first screen, I set the map bigger (100 hexes, think the default was around 20-30) to be "world scope" and my poor little laptop took a while to think and create a map...
This was a pretty crowded map, and I didn't see an option to juggle the ratios of land and water and such to customize things. So I thought I'd make a new map with a blank slate to work from...
From what little I played with it, I like this program. The hexes look pretty good, and there are quite a few options for placing cities and text as well as the terrain shown above. I think this could be a pretty good program for making maps.
The downside though is that placing every hex by hand is, well, a long process. To say the least. And it's tricky to lay out the terrain in a way that feels right. While it's possible to make a world map this way, it's for someone with more artistic talent and patience than me. Maybe there was an automated generator? Hah, of course there is, the Internet has everything after all :)
Thus began a few hours of Google searching and testing. Here's a roundup of some of the programs/ sites I found.
First, there's Terra Incognita. This is a pretty simple map, again I didn't see anywhere to change the settings to adjust the amount of terrain to water or any other features. I do really like the style of it though, it looks very pretty.
Roll For Fantasy has another kind of neat style, though not quite as nice. It is a bit of a pain to use, I had to scroll around a lot on the screen, and trying to picture the terrain block when you can't see it is a challenge. I made a few random maps and some of them didn't look too bad.
The Polygon Map Generation Demo continued the trend of pretty but not quite what I was looking for - though at least this one had a lot of settings to customize, which was nice, but it's also only geared for a single landmass it appears, so you'd have to create different continents and then stitch them together. Not terrible, but would take some work.
The final image is a pretty good size...
The Fantasy World Generator from the d20 SRD looked like what I wanted, but for some reason I couldn't get it to actually run and make a world :(
The Planet Map Generator also looked good, and this one I could get to run properly. This program has quite a few options...
I like this site a lot. Having the different layouts is nice, and you can change the colors and the maximum image size is pretty big...
The one that really took the cake though was Donjon. This is very similar to the Planet Map Generator before, but I liked it a little bit more, and the final image options are very nice. There are also a ton of different random generators at the site.
I ended up with these two that I liked the most, in a flat format and I love having the rotating globe as well..
None of these maps totally hit the feel I wanted, but it was nice to find some options. I think Hexographer will be great for making smaller maps, and the generators good for the global level maps. But, since they are randomly generated I'm going to have to sit for a while and make a ton of them to get the one I want. Oh well, that'll keep me busy until next week at least :)
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