Announcing GridSmith, make miniature scale maps on your PC

[jayres]

Byte Mountain, Inc. proudly announces the availability of their new product, GridSmith. GridSmith is a Windows program that creates graphical, grid-like maps for use in resolving combat or depicting encounters using miniatures.

Square graphical tiles are painted onto a grid with the mouse to build the map. Print your maps to fit many different miniature base sizes. The grid size is scaleable from 1/4" up to 3" in size. Draw you map once, and use it for different games (i.e. print out at a 1" square grid size for use with 25mm figures, such as Dungeons and Dragons miniatures, then print it at 1.5" for larger bases, such as Mage Knight).

GridSmith maps are usable with most of the popular role-playing and table-top miniature combat rules on the market.

Download the GridSmith evaluation here. This version contains a small subset of the hundreds of tiles available in the full version, but allows you to print maps created with either the evaluation or the full version (even maps that use tiles not present in the evaluation).

For more information, please visit http://www.gridsmith.com

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Does this REALLY require a 1Ghz or better processor?

 

[jayres]

It runs well on an 800mhz processor, but on a processor this slow the application does slow down a little bit when working on large maps. It will likely run just fine on slower processors, just be aware that because the application is very graphics intensive it could be sluggish when creating very large maps on anything below a 1Ghz speed.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

It runs well on an 800mhz processor, but on a processor this slow the application does slow down a little bit when working on large maps.

Seems to run ok on my piddly 500mhz-- at least the evaluation version, and at least in 8x10 size, which is about all I'd want to print anyway (barring firing this baby off to one of the huge plotters at work!)

It's very nifty.

I've read the EULA, but cut to the chase for me and make sure my understanding is correct:

Can I, as a publisher, post .bmp versions of maps (provided and labeled FREE OF CHARGE and "Created by GRIDSMITH at...") on my website, as a service to customers and to support my own products?

A few more questions before I shell out for the full version:

How many tiles are provided with the full version, what do you charge for additional tilesets, how many additional tiles will they contain, and how often will new tilesets appear (ie, how's your end-user support?);

Do you plan to add functionality to edit the Wall tilesets (seems a glaring omission...)

Again, it looks clean and easy to use, I'd love to support it as both a gamer and a publisher!

Wulf

 

[storyguide3]

Interesting EULA

As I read it, the EULA is the rough equivalent of Microsoft telling you that if you use Word to write a book, you cannot sell it, but you can give it away for free. Am I reading this right? Because if I am, no sale here for sure.

I'll stick with Profantasy, they don't try to tell people what they can and cannot do with the maps they create, so long as they don't electronically redistribute Profantasy symbol sets.

 

[jayresbytemountain]

Sorry about posting from another account. Apparently something happened with my first account, it no longer allows me to reply to topics, so I had to create another one.

Wulf:

Glad to see that it runs smoothly on a 500mhz, it hasn't been tested on a processor that slow. It will probably work just fine on that even on a map that's as large as 20X20. Incidentally, if you create maps that are larger than 1 page, it will span the map across multiple pages, from right-to-left, top-to-bottom.

The EULA is kind of complex, and I knew it would raise some questions. To answer yours, yes, if you put 'free of charge' somewhere (you don't even have to do that, as long as you don't actually charge anyone for it, it's cool) and have something that says 'Created with GridSmith' somewhere, that's all that's really required. A link to the site somewhere would also be most appreciated. I want (and encourage) people to make maps with GridSmith for their websites, as a support piece for home brew campaigns, etc.

The full version contains 6 tilesets (walls, the standard tileset, caverns, adventure objects, dungeon dressing, and furniture), for a total of 260 unique tile 'groups'. Let me explain this a little. When you select a 'tile' in GridSmith, you are actually selecting what is called a tile group. A tile group is a collection of tiles that are used together. An example of this would be one of the stone floor tiles. When you select that tile, what you see in the palette is 1 tile out of maybe 5-6 total tiles. When you select the area on the grid to draw the floor tiles, it populates those squares randomly (in the case of some floor tile groups) with tiles from that particular group. So, in those 260 unique tile groups (you would count 260 individual entries in the tile palette if you looked in all of the tilesets), those 260 groups are usually made up of 5-6 individual tiles (less so for objects), so you're getting a *bunch* of graphics with GridSmith. This isn't as clear as it should be in one paragraph, look in the help file about creating tilesets, it's got an entire chapter and explains it more fully than I can in a single post.

A new tileset, Additional Flooring (containing 28 new floor tile groups) will appear on the website this weekend as a free download. Availability of new tilesets will be slow at first until sales pick up, but we already have plans for new tileset expansions, to include modern and futuristic genres. As for charging for new tilesets, none of that is set in stone at this point. We hope to provide a few tilesets free of charge (and indeed, we also hope to build a community of supporters who create their own tilesets and submit them for inclusion on our download page), but we also plan to come out with larger tileset libraries as official 'expansions' for a nominal charge (price to be determined). As for how many tiles there will be, we can't say for sure until we get to that stage, but any official tileset expanions will definately contain enough tiles to warrent their purchase.

Admittedly, the inability to edit the walls tileset is a purposeful ommission. The reason for this is because the walls tileset is tied into certain logic within the tile placement engine so that it knows how to construct wall joints appropriately. Because of this, the wall tile groups *must* be constructed in a very specific format, if this format isn't followed exactly, wall joints won't match up and it will appear broken. During this first pass would couldn't come up with an elegant method to allow users to create new wall tile groups that wouldn't require them to follow very specific rules, so the decision was made to omit this feature in this version instead of leaving it in and potentially causing a nightmare for technical support. We are revisiting this functionality and have some ideas on how to open this up to end users in an elegant method that will be easy to follow, but since we just released version 1.0, such functionality will not become available for some time. Given all of that, if you really want to get a new wall group into the walls tileset, contact us, I'll send you instructions on how to construct your wall tile graphics, and we can work something out to put it together in a new wall tileset for you.

StoryGuide3 (and also in answer to Wulf):
I can see how at first the EULA would indeed appear that way. Let me give you the reasoning behind such a complex EULA. What we want to do is allow individual users (end users, players, etc., other than businesses) the ability to use GridSmith and put maps up on their website for their players and friends to use. What we ask in that respect is just a 'Made with GridSmith' caption somewhere, and ideally a link back to the website (i.e. a little free advertising).

For publishers who wish to use GridSmith in their products, it's a little different. In just about any game store you can find books of cutout dungeon tiles printed at 1" squares, which does essentially what GridSmith does. It would be *very* easy for someone to put together a book such as this using GridSmith with very, very little financial investment ($39.95 and you get hundreds and hundreds of tile graphics). What the EULA is designed to do is prevent some unscrupulous entreprenuer from buying GridSmith and then producing one of these books of cutout dungeon tiles using our graphics (or some other type of publication that consists mainly of graphics from GridSmith). We've invested a lot of time and money into this project, and you should agree that if another company simply takes all of our graphics and makes a ton of money after only spending $39.95 on our product, that wouldn't be very ethical, or fair to us. We also don't want to see someone collecting a whole bunch of GridSmith maps and tilesets and producing their own 'GridSmith Expansion', for reasons that I hope are obvious.

If you look at section 5 of the EULA, the last line reads 'Any distribution for money or other consideration of any User Map or User Tile Set is strictly prohibited without Byte's prior written consent.' What this means is if you want to use GridSmith to create battle maps for inclusion in your published adventures, sourcebooks, etc., write us an e-mail. Let us know what you're up to. Although we haven't started this leg of our campaign yet, we intend to pursue D20 publishers to encourage them to use GridSmith in this manner. What we hope the EULA does for us is get publishers to contact us before they do such a thing, so that we can simply keep on eye out for someone doing something like what we outlined above.

Having said all that, what we're likely to do in any instance of a publisher wanting to use GridSmith maps in their products will be determined on a case-by-case basis. If you just want to use GridSmith battle maps as a supplement in a published adventure or source book, we're likely to just ask for some specific mentioning in the credits, to possibly include the URL and maybe something like 'If you'd like to make your own battle maps like those in this book, please buy GridSmith, etc., etc.'. Of course, if you're going to use GridSmith to make battle maps in support of your product with the intent of making it a free download from your website, you don't even have to contact us (just a 'Made with GridSmith' and perhaps a link to the website will suffice). For projects that contain a larger portion of content created with GridSmith, we may work out something different. If indeed you'd like to create a book of cutout dungeon tiles as outlined above using GridSmith, by all means please contact us, we would definately be interested in such a project, but we are also going to ask for royalties as well.

The bottom line is, we simply didn't want someone to buy GridSmith and then make another product using all of our graphics. If you want to use GridSmith maps in your published product, contact us and we'll work out an equitable agreement that will please both sides. We would love to see GridSmith maps in published works, just let us know what you're up to and we'll work out a deal.

I hope this answers your questions and relieves any fears about the EULA. If anyone has any more questions or would like more information, feel free to contact me at jayres@bytemountain.com.

 

[storyguide3]

Thank you for the reply. I still do not agree. Profantasy put a great many hours of work into their software and symbol sets, they do not have this restriction on user maps. No sale.

 

[Max]

I posted a couple questions on your forums, but you seem to be monitoring ENWorld a little closer, so I'll ask here as well.

You answered some of my questions above, however I was wondering if the product can make diagonal walls. I saw the diagonal door in the demo, so I'm assuming it can. Just wanted to double check.

Any plans to make people/monster tiles? I mostly game via email or message board. Having characters and monsters on the map, and then posting it to my web site would be great.

Would it be possible to add a number/letter grid system to the map? Being able to say you are moving to square S-12 would be great for PBEM games.

Thanks,

Max

 

[jayresbytemountain]

Maxkuney:

I replied to your post on my forums, but I thought I would repeat it here for the benefit of anyone reading.

Our primary concern for GridSmith was to produce printed maps for use with miniatures. Since this was the focus, we didn't feel that creating a tileset of mobile objects (i.e. people and monsters, which would become static when printed on the map) would be beneficial to a majority of our users, so right now we don't have a tileset for such things. I had not anticipated GridSmith's usefulness in such a manner, however, so I will put this on our wishlist for future consideration.

As for numbering/lettering the grid, this is another bit of functionality that we want to put in, it just didn't make the cut for the final version. Our goal for this first release was to make the product as simple and intuitive as possible, and I didn't feel that our initial method for entering text into the grid was very elegant. This is on the list for future enhancement, and will be in the next update (no date for this yet). Users will be able to use the system to number the grid, provide movement modifiers to different squares, etc. Having said that, you can work around this by exporting your map as a bitmap and then using Paint or some other graphical editing program to add text to your map. Not the most elegant solution, but it should hold you over until we get this implemented.

On diagonal walls. Diagonal walls are coming, but they are not in this first version. I won't go into the details for why they were left out of this first version, but we didn't feel that delaying the product for this functionality would be healthy for either the product or the company. Diagonal walls *will* be implemented in the next update, so they are on their way. The diagonal doors can be used to represent an open door, and will eventually work with diagonal walls once they are implemented.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Thanks for the answers, Jay. I don't find the EULA that restrictive-- my questions were not by way of a rebuke, I just want to know where you stand. Your answer was informative (although not particularly surprising). As a publisher of Open Content, I know where you're coming from.

Diagonal walls need to come soon. I don't really consider the product complete without something so basic. Even if you have to design a diagonally sliced floortile with the wall graphic embedded, it's got to be there.

I'd like to see a preview of the floor tilesets included with the product. You have mentioned several groups of tilesets included with the product, but it looks like 80% of them are in the object layer-- which is great, for the first release, I'd hate to have to generate such things myself. But objects are not as universally useful (particularly to a publisher). Give me more floors!

EDIT: What kind of floors?

Dungeon (several styles of stone floors), Temple, Cavern, Lava, Egyptian Tomb (with sand drifts), Grass, Forest Paths (with trees, bushes, and fairy mushroom circles as objects); and in the sci-fi realm, Diamond Plate (including an object layer with black/yellow hazard stripes), Steel Grate, and other spaceship stuff. I don't just publish, you know, I still have to nurture my inner Warhammer 40K/Space Hulk child...

You know, it might be a pain in the ass, but a text description of every floor, wall, and object would go a long way to making a sale. I'd like to know when weird things like "Golden Idol" are included in the objects file. I'd like to see if "Lever: Marked Do Not Pull" is in the file. (Any good DM has got to have one of those).

With regard to text, why not just add a Text Layer? (Yes, I have read the help file all the way through...) I'm sure you're way ahead of me there, but a Text Layer to add notes would be great. Allow the user to set text that snaps to each tile, aligned to taste (align top left, top center, top right, etc. center of tile, etc.) Of course the ability to change font, size, color, and radial alignment is a must. I can't believe you got as far as you did programming this puppy and not be able to handle text.

What did you program in, by the way? Visual Basic?


Wulf