Hello fellow roleplayers.

There are many mapping tools for that lets you design a map at your computer. Some of them let you play the map at the computer, calculating field of vision. What I have yet to find, though, is a tool that lets you use hand drawn maps and play them on your computer, with field of vision.

I'm a student of computer science at the university of Dortmund in Germany. Next up is my master thesis, for which I plan to create this kind of mapping tool for pen&paper role playing.

The idea is to take your hand drawn map, scan it or take a photo, and feed it to the program. The program then analyses the image, scanning it for sight blocking objects like walls. Then you place one or more movable "players" at the entry point of the map and the program calculates field of vision and accessibility of the map, uncovering it as the players progress.

So far I plan the tool for use with relatively simple maps. Ideally pencil on white paper.

Features i plan to implement/to look into:
- Recognition of walls as sight blocking objects
- If possible: recognition of doors. These may be clicked in the tool to open and unblock vision and accessibility.
- Recognition of quad paper. It's lines should not block sight
- Game master and player windows. Game master window will show the whole map and maybe other information.
- Usage of different colors for different context. For example red (or any other color) might be only seen by the game master.

Now i need your opinion:
- How do you like the idea?
- Would you use a tool like this?
- What features does it need?
- What features would be nice to have?
- If needed: would you mind some (hopefully minor or non existent) restrictions on how you draw your maps?

Also I'd like to ask you to post or send me some of your hand drawn maps. These would be be used as a reference to different drawing styles, to test the tool and maybe (with your permission) as examples in my thesis. This would greatly help to improve the usability of the tool.

Thank you.
Jan Kleemann aka Karto

You can already use scanned height maps to generate your terrains in Unity 3d as well as Dark Game Studio.

This was created by me using a grey scale height map and a hand painted texture map in Dark Game Studio:




And this was created in Unity, no height map, but the terrain and encounters for this are all procedurally generated:


In case I forgot to mention it earlier both come with built-in toolkits for web-based, online network play... Unity 3d is free, and Dark Game Studio only set me back about $50 or so.

Wow. Pretty impressive.

RPGpundit

Impressive, indeed. That looks quite awesome. But, how long did it take you to make those? Can someone with no experience do maps like that right away?

My thesis is so far targeting indoor maps. Caves, buildings, etc. Regional maps might be an optional.

The target is to be minimalistic. People should be able to use it right away, with only little learning.

I spent about a month using dark game studio before I figured out how to generate terrain maps from heightmaps... It got even better though when I built a generator that would randomly select a seed number, and use that number to generate a fractal greyscale heightmap. DGS then automatically uses the fractal heightmap to generate a terrain, that is also then subsequently semi-randomly populated with DX9 trees, grass and shrubs (Roads for example being a specific color are not populated with trees grass and shrubs. Buildings and roads can be dropped onto predetermined "clear" areas after the terrain is generated.

At the moment I would just need to create a GUI interface where users could select the greyscale map  they want to load.

Unity is a bit different, The Unity map I did in about 4 hours. With Unity, one writes python like generator scripts that randomly select the terrain heightmap selects one or more texture maps to paint roads and lakes and such. Trees and buildings can be placed as part of the terrain, or automatically generated and placed while the game is running using an event trigger or proximity trigger.

Both very nice. If I had to choose now, knowing what I know, I would download and install the Unity 3d and start watching the Unity tutorials, as well as tuts that are available on youtube.

Doing this, you could have a protoype terrain generator in less than a week, and a polished one, with a GUI in less than a month. You can make Unity game builds builds for web, PC, Mac, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, and Iphones with the pro kit $1500. The free unity version lets you make games for PC, Web, Mac, and Iphones. All you have to do is let Unity know the directory or folder the scanned heightmaps are stored in to use them.

You should download it and play with it... At the moment I'm working on characters and animations... I'll UL some heightmaps from my library to photobucket and show you what they look like after they are rendered in the game engine... better yet, I'll UL a few Unity game walkthroughs. These run in Windows, and you'll use your arrow keys and mouse to navigate on the terrain FPS style.

Here's the 4096px x 4096px grey scale heightmap I used to generate the Dark Game Studio terrain... Black is low altitude (River valleys and lakes) white is higher (Hills and Mountains)

Here is the texture map also 4096px x 4096px, where I added placement of the base sand, riverbed, grass, and rock texture to the heightmap... Once the terrain is generated, you can randomly generate and place the 3d trees, shrubs, and building models by using the color from the texture map to determine "Off-limits" zones for tree and house placement.

Looks really nice and interesting. It has a different focus than my thesis, though.

I'm still missing comments about my thesis. Is nobody interested at least a bit?

Hex paper and ink would be nice additions, especially if it could distinguish different colours of ink (perhaps a preset list that one could change, so blue ink doesn't block line of sight, but black does). Also, setting the distance of the field of view to the radius of projection of light sources (especially multiple light sources) would be an extremely useful feature.

Feel free to use any maps of mine from here and here. I mostly do outdoor maps, but there are some indoor and urban maps that might be useful. Might also be worth approaching Melan and estar for some samples, since I know they've tons of suitable maps hidden away.

Thank you Pseudoephedrine, those maps are exactly what i need.

Actually i didn't even know there was hex paper, lol. Never seen it before. I'll see what i can do about it.

Ink.. you mean instead of pencil? Shouldn't be much of a problem. Actually it will be almost the same (for black ink). Using different colors is on my list. Shouldn't be to hard, either.

Yeah, instead of pencil. The most common method I'm aware of for making RPG maps is pencil first, then tracing over it in ink.

I have to say it doesn't feel really proper to me without hexes, or at least that Forgotten Realms cartographical style.

RPGPundit

Hello everyone,

i have started with my thesis and I'm currently working on erasing the grid from quad paper. So far i have been able to calculate the existing grid and today i'll start with the actual erasing.
What i really need right now are more maps on quad paper. I have only 2 maps like that right now and that is hardly enough to be sure that the algorithm is working fine.

If you have any maps on quad paper that you can scan and give me, I'd greatly appreciate it.

--Karto

It's most commonly referred to as "graph paper" in English, which may help you recruit people. I have two maps using it on page 2 of this thread.

Ahh, graph paper. Thank you very much.

You probably meant page 3. Those two are a new challenge. So far i have only tried maps with a higher resolution. My algorithm gets confused with the small distance between nodes in the grid .
It also gets confused by the fact, that part of the scan is blank .