More on mapping tools

I've got this love/hate relationship with Campaign Cartographer 2. I'd love for it to be a great mapping tool, I hate that it's not. :)

Sure CC2 (and CC3, which I haven't upgraded to) have a lot of power, but it's mired in a 1980's CAD mindset. (Because it's basically FastCAD with a mapping theme.) It's painfully difficult to do anything but the most basic things, and it's so non-intuitive that I forget how to use half of it when I take a break from it for a few months.

Now, there are basically two kinds of maps... overland maps and interiors. CC2 is actually pretty fair at the overland maps, which is where it started, because there isn't much to that. But I find that it's the interior maps... the mad scientist's lab or the space station... that I spend the most time on and want the most detail in.

The last time I needed an interior map, of a subway with an alien hive growing in it, I needed it in a hurry... and I started drawing it in CC2, got fed up with it, and switched to CorelDRAW. I've been using CD off and on since CD3, but I'm not sure I know it any better than CC2. And I whipped out my map in CD pretty quickly. It wasn't as pretty as I wanted, but that was a time thing... CD is capable of creating maps as pretty or prettier than CC2. So I decided that I'd give up the pretty symbols of CC2 for the faster mapping of CorelDRAW.

As I said in my last post, I've been trying to move away from pay-for software.* And since I don't use most of CorelDRAW's power, I'm finding Inkscape to be an adequate substitute so far. It doesn't have built-in fractal tools, but there are some interesting-looking plug-in scripts that might do the job.

The real reason I have this love/hate relationship with CC2 is that I love the symbols and hate the software. I like pretty maps, and there's nothing like being able to grab one of several high-tech consoles and plop them down onto your map... I can say from experience that drawing those consoles yourself is more time-consuming that might be expected. If I could only find a way to easily extract the CC2 symbols into a usable format (some kind of vector object I could use in Inkscape), I'd be happy camper.

What we need is a movement toward creating and sharing roleplaying map symbols in an open vector format. Hmm. Looks like the next openclipart.org contest may be Fantasy Mapping Symbols. So I'm not the only one thinking along these lines.

Footnotes:

• - The idea behind moving away from pay-for software is to eventually abandon Windows before it devours my soul. Or declares my installation not Genuine. But before I can go fully-Linux, I need to find adequate subtitutes for the essentials.

- I'm not as interesting in Dunjinni-style bitmaps as I am the scalable vector symbols in CC2. I think Dunjinni maps are very pretty, but I can't do that level of art myself, and I need to be able to create my own symbols/objects that blend in.