Recommended World Map Programs?

[Pbartender]

Mapmaker Plus is pretty neat. Lots of great fonts and images for making medieval and renaissance style maps.

 

[CCamfield]

im more looking for something to make entire world maps with. any suggestions? Checked out autorealm for like village/castle/town etc. making but i couldnt download it. broken link? *shrug*

That page is odd, in that it has a link to version 1.21(?) but version 2 is the current one.

Here's a link to the up-to-date Sourceforge page:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/autorealm/

You can ABSOLUTELY use Autorealm for overland maps. Attached you'll find a portion of a map that I made with Autorealm for a homebrew world.

 

[DaveStebbins]

http://www.ridgecrest.ca.us/~jslayton/software.html

Wilbur, world map creation software from the same people that later created Fractal Terrains. This is an earlier version of the software, which happens to be free. I haven't used Fractal Terrains, so I can't say how much it has progressed, but after playing with Wilbur for a little while (definitely use the tutorials) I found that it creates some spectacular world maps.

 

[DaveStebbins]

Autorealm

http://autorealm.sourceforge.net/

 

[Fargoth]

I own and use Wilbur, Fractal Terrains, Photoshop and the Campaign Cartographer suite of products. It's tough to answer your question w/o knowing the breadth of your experience. Wilbur is indeed free but it takes some time to get some good results. Photoshop is great but the best results are achieved with it by those who have some serious experience with it ... IMHO anyway. Campaign Cartographer is great though most folk mention the fact that the learning curve is steep.

I feel the Fractal Terrains is the easiest program to use to generate a world map. It can export it's files into Wilbur, CC2, and various graphic type files for Photoshop as well. By just using the default settings you can have a world image that is appealing. After a period of toying around you can easily figure out how to refine your land masses. Of course the rainfall, temperature, climate and Gaia views of the world are sweet facets to the program as well.

Whenever I create a new world or continental map usually start out in Fractal Terrains to generate a nice coastline and then export it into one or more other programs for further detailing.

So my answer would be Fractal Terrains based on my experience with all of the aforementioned software titles.

Hope this helps,
Paul

 

[D+1]

Ive done abit of searching over the net, found a few which are nice but no free ones which are what im looking for. Wondering what you guys recommend using?

It's going to make a difference as to what style of maps you like, how much time and effort you want to put into making your maps, and what you want to do with the maps that you end up with. Will these be primarily political maps, terrain maps, highly detailed or for mere orientation; will they be modified heavily later on, will they cover a VERY large area or more of a smallish locale? Are you going to whip out a campaign world when you have a spare afternoon or two, or do you need to transfer a 10-year old campaign world with currently hand-drawn maps covering an entire planet?