Looking for a Map Editor

[Adriddae]

Battle of Wesnoth has a map editor:

http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Screenshots


Note: the tiles that represent "cities" are a single house instead of the clustered buildings, towers etc.

Other than that, there it looks pretty decent. It even has different season look for each tile.

[songqu88@gmail.com]

I've tried the BoW editor, and the style looks a bit old, like those 1990s rpg overworld maps. There are custom map graphics that users make though, so maybe there are some good graphics. On the whole, I was rather dissatisfied as it gave only a single top-down view of a map, and the options for cities and castles were lacking.

[Tom]

The BoW graphics stink. They're not up to par with the current ones and I wouldn't want to move backwards.

The eldonthompson ones are made with some Might & Magic editor. Also something that's not adequate.

The World Creator looks interesting, but from what I read we would probably have to supply our own artwork, which puts it in the same category as Djundini and many other existing map editors.

Right now, the best I've found is Civ 5. I'm experimenting with that a little. It has a bit of an awkward workflow because it doesn't render in-editor, only in-game. But it looks nice and has the correct scale.

[fodder]

0ad - http://wildfiregames.com/0ad/ ? or elemental: war of magic (from stardock)?

since i don't mod things.. no idea if they are of any use at all.... haven't even touched 0ad aside from looking at the site from time to time.. there seems to be people making maps.. so there must be an editor or some such somewhere. no idea where though XD

haven't played much of ewom either... aside from a bit when it first came out...  i just don't tend to have the patience to play the same things through again and again. short attention span you might say.

[Tom]

0ad - http://wildfiregames.com/0ad/ ? or elemental: war of magic (from stardock)?

wrong scale

[GoldPanda]

But I like the current maps. 

[Corwyn]

I've used the Civ 4 editor, and it's been great.  Haven't tried Civ 5 yet though.

Scale is not a problem with Civ4, since you can zoom in and out as much as you need.  Here's an example that I quickly put together for one of my character's wiki pages:
http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/Ni%27Tessine_Family/Corwyn

I suspect the main problem will be intellectual property concerns though!  It doesn't seem like we can just use their copyrighted art for terrain, cities, etc...

That might actually be a selling point in Civ 4's favor.  There's a *huge* wealth of "mods", includings custom art terrain that amateur artists have made, and who are very likely willing to let us use for free (if we ask nicely).  Civ 5 no doubt always has mods by now (I haven't checked though), but I would guess it's not as complete as Civ 4's and not as high quality.

[Tom]

Theoretically (well, legally), yes. Then again, the same is true for the current AoW maps and in 10+ years there were no complaints.

[Lorgan]

Those civ 4 maps look pretty cool. I wonder how the blight would look on them...

[Fleugs]

I agree, they look nice!

[Foundation]

Theoretically (well, legally), yes. Then again, the same is true for the current AoW maps and in 10+ years there were no complaints.

Haha, win?

[Bluelake]

Civ5 maps do look really impressive.

Perhaps it'd be best to have independent art on BMs maps, though? Like what Corwin said: art made by users to apply on the civ maps, and still use the foundation of the map generator for that?

[J-Duds]

My first thought was to use Europa Universalis 3.  (and not only because I was playing it today)  The map is simple, yet still has some medieval-esque detail to it, is already divided into regions, and most modding in the game is done by editing simple text files and letting the engine churn out the results.  If you wanted to use different sprites or textures it should just be a matter of changing what file is loaded. 

Of course, I haven't talked to anyone who wanted to build their own map from scratch with it, so it could be more difficult than I think. 

[Corwyn]

Theoretically (well, legally), yes. Then again, the same is true for the current AoW maps and in 10+ years there were no complaints.

Yes, that's certainly very true.  Some thoughts:

1. Age of Wonders hasn't been active for a while.
2. The Civ franchise is under active continued development, and it's quite profitable.
3. Perhaps due to this, Civ's owners are reportedly more litigous.  The game "Evony" had a different name previously ("Civony"), until (it is believed) Take-Two's laywers forced them to change it.
4. In my opinion, it's best not to roll the dice and gamble on staying below Take-Two's radar, when there are legal options available that look just as good (if not better -- some of the terrain art is better in my opinion).

[fodder]

.... it might make the front page... (not so) free advert