Mapping Software

[Mike V]

On the Kickstarter just completed there was mention of Esteren mapping software. Presumable this would preserve the style of developed maps. I currently use Campaign Cartographer 3+ and was wondering if he thought is to develop the templates and symbols to drop into that product or are we looking at a standalone product.

Is there a status?

Thanks,
Mike V

[Pierstoval]

Hi Mike, I'm in charge of Esteren Maps development

I don't know Campaign Cartographer 3 as I have never used it, but to sum up things about Esteren Maps, here are some technical informations :

• The app will be online only (the beta is ready but not yet "available for public", we're waiting a little to communicate on this. And the translation to English is not made yet).
• It's based on a powerful and heavily maintained PHP/Symfony backend, with a LeafletJS-based (and overriden) frontend map management, and I developed a big web-service system behind it to provide data and features to the map (markers, routes, zones, but also map configuration, itineraries, etc.).
  Full web
• The coordinates system is a bitmap one: top-left is {0,0} and {5,10} goes 5 units to the right and 10 units to the bottom (bitmap…)
• Map data are limited to markers, routes and zones, and there are small icons for marker types. The rest is based on SVG polygons with specific colors depending on the element's type.
• The map background is made of tons of 128x128px wide JPG tiles, based on a big map painted by Chris (one of Esteren's illustrators) just for the occasion.

I don't know if any of these data types can be injected into Campaign Cartographer 3, so if you have technical informations about this software, it could be good, and the team would be able to decide whether we can provide tools for Campaign Cartographer (even though I don't think it's possible yet, there is so much work to be done that it would take a lot of time :/ )

[Mike V]

Pierstoval,
Thanks for the reply. It appears that you may very well have the things needed to use CC3+ as a platform. What I have seen folks do is to provide map background templates and symbols that are unique to the atmosphere they are trying to depict. The utilities and services are provided by the underlying application suite.
Addons that I use are City Designer and Dungeon Designer for urban and dwelling needs.

Info is at their site: http://www.profantasy.com

A full web application is useful, especially is collaboration is desired but there is an advantage to having a native platform that has done a lot of the compatibility work already. Plus a community that needs to be introduced to SoE.

[Pierstoval]

I would like to check it out but actually as the app is not free and as I would only use it to "know how it works" and to "know how I can provide tools for it", I don't feel that it's useful to me to buy it right now.

But I'll see in the future what I can do First, I need to finish our app !