Before I get into the updates, it has come to my attention that there has been some confusion over Hexographer's licensing even though the issue was resolved very favorably a few months back. In short, the full license is a license that doesn't expire. In the early stages of Hexographer a similar license was accomplished through a planned series of one-year licenses. Based on feedback from reviewers and users (and honestly I didn't want to send out new licenses every year) I changed it so the full license will work indefinitely for this major version of Hexographer.

Also, as people who have followed it know, I've been updating the software regularly.

Now on to the updates. First the big picture:

There are a slew of fairly major changes in the newly updated version of Hexographer. The theme of this release is "breaking out of the hex" because two of the most important changes allow you to place terrain and features independent of the hex. A feature icon (castle/city/cave/etc.) doesn't have to be in the center of the hex and you can even have many in a hex and you can scale the icons down in size (or up if you have a reason to) in case you want to show a couple feature near each other or represent their significance, etc. Likewise terrain can be placed independent of a hex and you can also place individual terrain icons (no background) in case you want to show denser mountains, a thicker forest, etc. See the samples below for an example of these features.

Here's a fuller list:

• You can place a dot in the center of your hexes to more easily measure sight-lines.
• Elevation/plateau lines will now have hash marks on one side. And you can toggle which side of each line gets the hashes.
• Features can now be placed in ways that break the one-to-one relationship to a hex. You can snap them to preset points of a hex or just place them freeform.
• Related to feature placement, you can scale down (or up) the icon size of a feature. This allows you to place two icons nearer eachother, make less important features smaller, etc.
• You can likewise add terrain independent of hexes. You can place terrain as before(one to one), or place it independent of hexes, or place just extra terrain icons independently of the hexes. For example, you can create a mountain range where the hexes don't match the hex grid overlay and then add in extra mountain icons to make it more dense looking.
• Four new terrain types were added, but in a slightly different style. The terrain types are forest, mountains, badlands, and wheat fields. These are used in games like "Settlers of Catan" and allow the tool to be used to create maps for "Settlers of Catan" or other games in similar styles. The older forest, mountains, and cultivated farmland icons weren't a good fit, but the existing plain farmland could be used for the sheep fields. (The older forest, mountains and cultivated farmland icons are still in the tool because they are ideal for classic RPG maps.)

For details on these features including samples, see the new version announcement:
http://inkwellideas.com/hexographer_forum/index.php?topic=108.0
The main Hexographer page is at:
http://inkwellideas.com/roleplaying_tools/hexographer/