Hey guys, I've just unleashed a
dungeon mapping tool I've been working on for the past couple of years. It's intended to aid manual mapping via an efficient keyboard-driven (and attractive!) interface. Ladies and gentlemen, I present you
"bbbbut there's Grid Cartographer bro, why did u bother lulz?" Well, I literally learned about GC the next day after I came up with the bright idea to do this. Checked out a few videos of the thing, and decided that my design goals are different enough that I still want to write my own (never used GC myself, by the way). Plus, after more than two decades of writing software commercially for other people, a man needs a project he can call his own. I guess that's as good a reason as any.
While the Game Link feature in Grid Cartographer is certainly cool and technically impressive (and so are other auto-mappers, such as Where Are We?, Gold Box Companion, and The All-Seeing Eye), I'm really
really really against auto-mapping of any kind — to me, mapping these games one cell at a time is half the fun! So, depending on your stance on this pressing issue, you might absolutely love Gridmonger, or perhaps not care about it at all (but if you ask me, you should definitely give creating your own maps a go!)
Well, and did I mention it's free?????????
You luddites should be pleased to hear that it runs fine on Win7 (probably XP too, but didn't bother to check). There's a Mac version as well, and eventually I'll do a Linux build (I'm just too lazy to set up a dev environment on my Raspberry Pi...)
Anyway, here's a few screenshots as bait; if you're interested, it has its own
website with all the info you'll ever need, including a very comprehensive
manual.
https://gridmonger.johnnovak.net/
Comments, bug reports, feature requests, etc. are always welcome (but don't ask for auto-mapping or full mouse support, I just don't care about these things). It should be pretty solid, I've completed Eye of the Beholder I and about half of Uukrul with it.
I'll probably update some of themes slightly over the next couple of days, but I wanted to release it TODAY, otherwise I might sit on it for another year...
Pleasant dungeoneering to y'all!