Monday, August 6, 2012

Experiments with Inkscape and Form Controls

Nicu's Open Clip Art is indispensable but its missing some things.

  1. I have to improve his city clip art. basically making it more elements and detailed.  
  2. I will have to make a low defensed town 
  3. I may have to alter villages, the "fields" look wierd.  

Doing some experiments I'm working on Caithness. As an MIB i plan to contribute this 32 scale map.
The Caithness Map in GURPS Banestorm takes about 4 x 5 landscape letter sized hex map in 32km per hex scale (day marching scale) where there are 13 x 8 hexes in each map. 
Do-able using GIMP DnD 2nd Ed Hex Map Tools. Probably 1 hour per map once all the prep is done. So at least 20 man hours to map the whole thing. 
As a JPG file it really needs to be fixed to be print quality; will research if there is a way to use Inkscape instead. 
it is a relatively easy project since the map is not detailed at all. As compared to the Anatolian map where there are divisions of themes and a lot of towns. If I pull this off I'll have a process in doing a map, hopefully with about less than 1 hour per map (total cost of ownership).

Inkscape saves into SVG files, but I can't upload that and must export it to PDF. You will notice there is no pixelation when you zoom in. That is Nicu's city map which I have to improve on. Since this is a low powered setting aka historical there is not going to be a lot of impressive castles. There are fortified towns, but some castles but not that grand as found in fantasy.

Notice the file is 77kbps the SVG with the Copyrighted Caithness Map I'm drawing from (since I really have to redraw it) is roughly about 350kb. I predict it to be about a meg each letter sized map when done. its going to be as sparse as the Banestorm Map BUT the svg file is going to hosted in a mediafire or zipped in a google drive link so that people are free to add details. Of course I have to upload the new low tech Icons I will make using Nicu's work.

I'll try to find or make tutorials for terrain features.

Another project I'm researching on is Editable PDFs, particularly NPC character Cards in an editable PDF that would accept image files. Basically Preformated letter sized pdf where GMs can upload pictures, save the pdf, and print out NPCs. I'm still working on what form function will accept images once the form is a PDF.  Still in the middle of research, the main problem is not yet solved.



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