Announcing GridSmith, make miniature scale maps on your PC

[jayresbytemountain]

You are correct that over half of the tiles exist on the object layer. However, if you include the Additional Flooring free tileset (which will be available later today for download from the website), there are 77 unique floor tiles (this includes all of the rooms, hallways, etc, from the cavern tileset). This does cover a wide variety of different types: stone slabs, lava, flagstones, marbled tiles, repeating patterns, wood planks, etc. These floor tiles only cover interiors, we don't have any tiles for exterior environments but our first planned tileset expansion is for the great outdoors (unless we get an overwhelming number of requests for something else). We plan on including modern and sci-fi genres as well (and have had numerous requests already for such tilesets), but those will come after the outdoor tileset expansion. Before anyone flames me for such an obvious ommission, we wanted to include tiles like these in the initial release but in today's economy money is tight and budgets are shallow. We had to cut corners somewhere, so we decided to make tilesets that concentrated on interiors, and save outdoor tilesets for a future expansion.

As for a text description of every object and a preview of every floor tile, we're working on expanding the website to include more visuals and information. While I can't say that we're going to include previews of *every* tile or list text descriptions of every object that is included in the tilesets, you will be seeing more information in the future on the website about what the tilesets include. We are also working on putting up a few example maps (both in GridSmith native format as well as bitmap format) that will include a variety of tiles so you can see what can be done. I'm not sure if you noticed or not, but on the right-hand side of the website (you may have to scroll down a bit to see) there are 6 tiles from the shipping version of GridSmith as a preview. These 6 are randomly selected from 50 tiles (a cross section of both floor tiles and objects), and change each time you view the page. It's not exactly what you were suggesting, but that will give you a little taste of what's included in the full version.

A text layer will come at the same time as diagonal walls, and we plan on making all of that available in the first update (this will be a free update). We had a system in place, but tester feedback indicated that it wasn't very elegant and was difficult too use, so the decision was made to remove that feature before release. We thought it would be better to have users asking for more features instead of contacting tech support to work through a difficult interface for entering text. We're working on a better method for handling all of this, and I hope that once this functionality is back in it will be easy and intuitive to use.

And finally, this was all written in Delphi.

Keep those questions coming!

 

[Cecil]

OK, color me very interested....both as a gamer and a (wannabe) publisher.
edit: WOW--impressive. I already made my purchase--pending processing.


As a publisher, I'd like to use the product to make a page-sized map (if possible, even an occassional larger map, but not at miniature resolution) in a product and then offer the same map at miniature scale free from my website (with appropriate credits and links in both places).


As a gamer, I have a couple of questions:

1)- How easy is it to add new tilesets? Is it a simple bitmap/jpg or gif-processing job?
edit: answered on your website--yes I can add tilesets--not sure how easy it will be.

2)- How easy is it to identify and establish my own layers? (ie, can I create my own "critter object" and place it on a map to show initial layout?)

NOTE: Some of these questions may be answered by the demo--going there next.

 

[d20books]

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

Windows NT SP4, 2000, Windows XP (or later). GridSmithTM may run under Windows 95, 98, or ME, but we cannot gaurantee stability.

This basically puts it out of reach for me. I'm proud to say that I'm on a Macintosh.

Got a Java version?

 

[jayres]

Cecil:

That sounds like a great way to use GridSmith. Shoot me an e-mail (jayres@bytemountain.com) and tell me about the product you'd like to use GridSmith with, I'd love to hear more.

To answer your questions:

1. You can create new tilesets by clicking on Edit | Tileset Editor to bring up the Tileset Editor dialog box. There's an entire chapter on this in the help file, so I won't go into too much more detail here. You can use bitmaps or jpeg's. Really, the only thing to keep in mind when creating your own tilesets is that you need to have all of your graphics cut up into squares before you start bringing them into GridSmith. The actual process of creating tile groups and getting your graphics into them is a fairly straightforward process. While this is an advanced function of GridSmith, it should be easy enough to figure out without resorting to the help file much. I may write a simple tutorial on my forums in the near future to cover this.

2. You can't create your own layers (although that is an interesting idea), but you can create a tileset of creature graphics that exist on the object layer, which should get you the functionality you seek.


d20books:

Nope, no Java version at this time. We may consider it in the future if we find an easy way to do a port, but no plans at this time, unfortunately.