Illwinter's Floorplan Generator

[Johannes]

http://www.illwinter.com/floorplan/

Illwinter's Floorplan Generator is a grid based dungeon and wilderness floorplan creator. The floorplan generator can be used to quickly draw and print an encounter floorplan for your favorite pen and paper roleplaying game. It is very quick and easy to create a simple floorplan, you just select what terrain type each square should be and the program fixes the rest. E.g. a cave wall next to a rocky ground will automatically create a jagged wall, but the same cave wall next to a marble floor would create a much smoother wall because this is likely to be an indoor room with polished walls.

Features
Here is a list of some of the features in Illwinter's Floorplan Generator.

• About 50 different terrain types to choose from
• Some icons included for the most common objects, e.g. doors, stairs, tables, beds, trees, bushes, pentagram
• Color maps or old school black and white style
• Adjacent terrains interact automatically to create jagged edges, smooth transitions and shadows when necessary
• Random fractals used to create shapes for cave walls, rivers and other non regular terrains
• Create a multi-page pdf with the dungeon divided into pages suitable for printing
• Configurable square and paper sizes, (default is 1 inch squares on A4 pages)
• Outdoor and dungeon shadows with configurable strength
• Export to your favorite paint program for finishing touches
• Import your own icons
• Configurable grid, default is to not draw it on top of walls and with thicker lines between pages
• Grid based, everything is placed in squares or on square edges (although icons can be placed and rotated freely)
• Shortcuts to quickly put a random door, tree or bush in a square
• Dungeon layout can be imported from a simple ASCII text file (one letter per square)
• Create random dungeons automatically (not fully implemented)
• Editor to create rules for your own random dungeon (not fully implemented)

Upcoming dungun editor for PnP that might interest some people here. From Illwinter of Dominions & Conquest of Elysium fame.

But no release or release date yet. Or price.

 

[mondblut]

That's what we get instead of Dominions 5, or Dominions RPG, or another proper monocled game??

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY.......

 

[Johannes]

That's what we get instead of Dominions 5, or Dominions RPG, or another proper monocled game??

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY.......

Cause it's a hundred times simpler to make, probably.

Otoh they could also just release new nations for Dom4

 

[Mortmal]

Thats a let down, i was expecting them working on some rpg or roguelike instead....

 

[flabbyjack]

So guys... Dominions!

 

[Haba]

That's what we get instead of Dominions 5, or Dominions RPG, or another proper monocled game??

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY.......

Because it is a part of what they are working on next?

And besides, those crazy fools are still patching Dom3 and CoE3 (December 2016)

New Dominions game at least seems unlikely.

 

[Dayyālu]

Tbh, this could be mightily useful if very cheap. Sub 5 bucks cheap.

 

[Matalarata]

Oh gawds... I already know I'll buy this and then stick to my trusted fractal mapper.

But the warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you support Illwinter...

Spoiler

 

[Dayyālu]

Oh gawds... I already know I'll buy this and then stick to my trusted fractal mapper.

"my trusted fractal mapper" liiink or else

I've finally broken the curse of "Eternal DM" but my DM nowadays can't draw for shit, everything helps!

 

[Matalarata]

Don't go there bro... It's an aged software, not so friendly unless you already have some CAD knoweledge or similar. But it's flexible and quite powerful, or maybe it's just that by sticking to it for ~9 years it suddenly became good for what it is. You'll need to scrounge the net for art libraries though, the default ones are shit. My personal opinion? There's better software out there, it's just that I grew fond/attached/experienced.

Here you go:
http://www.nbos.com/products/fractal-mapper

Here are a couple of examples, part of an adventure I'm writing to be played on Roll20.

Spoiler

Took me about 45 minutes, but I was designing and imagining encounters on the fly

Spoiler

This one only took 20 min, but I had it already designed on paper, which took me a couple of hours. I usually design on the fly but I wanted a symmetrical building, broken up and with multiple approach choices. I'll stop here before tl:dr

They're both quite bare, for one because FM exporting tool has stinky compression and Roll20 limits my uploads to 10mb files. I use Gimp to compress them a little more but that's the extent of my image editing skilz. Secondly, I like to have everything PCs can interact with as a separate .png on the map. Makes editing-on-the-fly easier and cleaner and, since we get little time to play each week, doubles up as a reminder of what actions they've already taken inside the map (like barricading doors or removing furnitures). For example, in the first one many entry point are actually filled with rubbles that are considered arrow slits, the second one has doors and shit all around...


Edit: both in game areas are 300x160 ft

 

[nikolokolus]

This tool looks pretty interesting. Something that will let me create more organic maps than dungeonographer and isn't as clunky as Campaign Cartographer sounds like a win to me.

Then again we could all just steal Dyson Logos' maps from now until the End of Days and still not run out of maps.

 

[agris]

You'll need to scrounge the net for art libraries though, the default ones are shit.

Please link the art libraries that you use.

 

[Matalarata]

Please link the art libraries that you use.

I'm afraid it's impossible... I have about 2gb of textures and .png (like terrain features, furniture and equipment), I put them together from various sources like old torrents, free domains and the occasional high seas sailing. I could upload the catalogued portion of my archive to my google drive and send you a link, just PM me. Consider that the majority of it can be downloaded for free from the net, mainly it's for the ease of use of having everything already categorized...

 

[Johannes]

Early access

http://store.steampowered.com/app/630900/Illwinters_Floorplan_Generator/

 

[Eadee]

That's what we get instead of Dominions 5, or Dominions RPG, or another proper monocled game??

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY.......

I barely scrathced on the surface of Dominions4. I'm fine with waiting a long time until 5

However I used several floorplan creating software (CC3 being the last one) and always endet up drawing floorplans with a pen/pencil or on a whiteboard again because all those programs take much more time to use than to draw stuff myself.

The only reason I might use them is if I plan on writing an adventure to sell it. But then most of those programs have restrictions if you want to use the maps you make comercial so... Idk.

So I'm curious whether I'm just too inapt to use those programs, or if they're really that time consuming to use.

Matalarata how long does it take you to create a new floorplan which isn't in a style you used before in another floorplan? And how long do you need for a floorplan in a style you used before? (Including time to search stuff in or for your library).

 

[Matalarata]

It really depends on what I'm drawing. Consider I mainly do battlemaps for various pnp settings, a large ruined building only requires snap-to-grid polygons and fractalization while a relatively small forest clearing takes time, if you want it to look good, since you have to place and rotate each tree individually. Many mappers do not allow objects (.png) to cast shadows, so if you want them you'll have to pair each tree with a fake polygon on a hidden layer and use that to define drop shadows...

Then it's all about details, a single background texture takes little to no time, but I like having different terrains. That requires drawing, feathering and scaling each area. I used CC some yrs ago but I find Fractal Mapper to be much more versatile, even if the interface is a bit of a mess. As for styles and libraries, each map I make is done starting from scratch (almost, I keep blank maps with precise measures and grid, just to save some time). My library is quite well organized and after years of browsing I'm usually able to find objects easily. Sometimes you do lose the odd minute or two swearing like an animal though...

I'd say usually 30-60 minutes to draw a bare map and then ~45 min or so for the finishing touches once uploaded on roll20.

 

[Eadee]

Okay, then it really is time-consuming and I'm not too dumb to use them right.

Thanks for explaining it in detail.

 

[udm]

Bought IFG as it's on sale. It's exactly what I need for my next PnP session. It reminds me a lot of HOMM3 map editor: simple, easy-to-use, and able to produce visually appealing black-and-white maps. Previously I'd been using Grid Cartographer for B&W maps, but IFG does one thing better: it actually smooths out edges and corners so the layout looks more organic.

Of course, I'd look elsewhere if you want something more complex, but at this price range, it's a steal for what it can do. If you're not too fussy, you can do full-coloured dungeons, towns, etc. Too bad there's not a very big Workshop community, and given it's Ilwinter we're talking about, I don't expect there to be major updates/changes beyond what's already there.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

black-and-white maps.

Only monochrome? The store page shows colour images too, is that not possible?

 

[udm]

black-and-white maps.

Only monochrome? The store page shows colour images too, is that not possible?

Yeah you can do coloured maps too, but there are better options like Arkenforge and other upcoming projects like Spellarena. The lighting produced in IFG is very basic. Then again, as I said, if you're not too fussy and are running more of a dungeon crawl, this is certainly a good option. It even has a random dungeon generator that produces nice-looking layouts.

EDIT: Just realised you replied after I edited my post heh

 

[Mortmal]

It's basic yes but nothing is easier and faster to use than this.

 

[udm]

Yeah I created, exported and printed 3 A4-sized maps in 10 mins. Really fast.

 

[Norfleet]

I once used my own house as a dungeon, but it turns out that even with half the hazards disabled, it would TPK high-level parties within the first 2 levels. Practically no rules adaptations were made, other than that radiation shielding also blocks scrying and teleportation.

 

[Haba]

I once used my own house as a dungeon, but it turns out that even with half the hazards disabled, it would TPK high-level parties within the first 2 levels. Practically no rules adaptations were made, other than that radiation shielding also blocks scrying and teleportation.

I cast "disintegrate" on the living room wall.

Spoiler

OPEN CONCEPT!

 

[Arthandas]

Is it any good for mapping dungeon crawlers like early Wizardry titles?