Wilbur vs. Auto-Realm

[jdrakeh]

I'm looking to do up a cheap, cheesy, map for next week's game and I've recently stumbled across two free mapping prgrams (my PC is too old to run CC, so that is a non-option). Auto-Realm I have some experience with, but it has been a while (2002-ish). Wilbur (here) I had never heard of until this morning (which is ironic, 'cause I lived in the same town as the developer for almost three years). Anyhow, if anybody has experience with both programs, what I want to know is. . . how do they stack up?

I gather that Wilbur is less a true mapper than it is a photot/terrrain manipulation program, but that should mean that I can crop in a satellite image and alter the heck out of it, creating a phot-realistic map. Auto-Realm is okay, IIRC, but that "snap tp" screen size thing was a complete pain in the ass (the maps couldn't be any larger than your screen short of some heavy menu flipping). Again, though, I have zero experience with Wilbur and only limited experience with an older version of Auto-Realm. So. . .

Which program should I be looking at for some quick map generation (note that I have PhotoShop, which I'll use to add text, regardless of which program I actually generate the map with) ?

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Actually, I would use Inkscape, which you can use in combination with images generated by either AutoRealm or Wilbur.

Take a look at my Cartography Workshop for more details.

 

[jdrakeh]

Actually, I would use Inkscape, which you can use in combination with images generated by either AutoRealm or Wilbur.

Take a look at my Cartography Workshop for more details.

Thank you so much! Between that and Rich Staats' stuff, I should be good to go! (I'm skipping the GIMP, though).

 

[3catcircus]

Hmm - if you can run Autorealm, you can run Campaign Cartographer. The only major difference is price...

As to "snap to" - well - Auto-Realm is vector-based, so it doesn't matter because you can zoom in or out as much as you want. That is the *biggest* roadblock for people used to MSPaint style drawing programs. Vector-based programs don't care about the screen size because the drawing can be scaled to any size desired.

I like using Wilbur to take existing maps and making them more "realistic" by adding topo lines, but it really isn't a mapping program.

 

[jdrakeh]

Hmm - if you can run Autorealm, you can run Campaign Cartographer. The only major difference is price...

I can just barely run Auto-Realm. The "snap to" probalem I mentioned isn't a function of zooming in or out, it is (or was) a program bug in the last version of Auto-Realm that I used. The Auto-Realm program only applied the layers (such as grids/hexes) to the portion of the map originally visible in the working window, not the entire map surface. If you zoomed out, only that one, small, section of the map would have the layer applied to it.