The Campaign Builder's Guild

Quote from: Fortunato
As a player, I'm a sucker for tracking down shooting stars.  I'd HAVE to go hunting for that :)

That's your call, as a player, but I'd advise against it.  It's just background flavor and folk-lorish event to explain why the world is going to hell in a handbasket.  The setting is more about the struggle between the natural world and the unnatural, and about people living in a world that seems like it is ending.  Heroes are fighting to hold the Corruption at bay, not to defeat it - no one is particularly optimistic about doing that, and those who are quickly lose their zeal as the dismal reality beats their spirit into the dust.

Quote from: Fortunato
As for Sketch Up, I heard it's for 3-d modeling more than other graphic stuff.

It is 3D modeling software, and it gets used for architecture and urban planning, as well as landscaping and other mapping-related things.  I've already seen substantial progress on an amazing fantasy city map that a member of the CG is making.

Quote from: Gamer PrintshopOf course I use Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 9 for all my mapping needs, but it's not free, though not expensive either, plus its very powerful, feature rich and much easier to use than GIMP/Photoshop (though Xara is a vector app and not an image editor).

I'll have to look into that.  I've seen it mentioned a lot on CG forums.  Do you use a graphics program afterward for any finishing touches, or does Xara take care of all the effects and styles you need?

I'm finding CC3 to be great at being adequate, so far.  If it can do the kind of stunning stuff I've seen at CG, I certainly need more practice.  The most limiting thing I"m running into, is what you already pointed out - the symbol set.  I keep thinking that I could always try making my own symbols, but frankly, I don't know that I want to dump that much time into it at the moment.

The thing that looks appealing about Sketch Up is that I use to mod Doom, the first three iterations, and half-life.  It really reminds me of level design, and it looks like you can get images from your maps from any angle you like - top down like traditional maps, bird's eye views, PoV shots.  I think it could prove incredibly useful for immersing players.  Of course, that all depends on whether the it is as easy as they claim it is.  If it takes too long to make a nice map, it might end up not useful.  Still could be cool for a labor of a love.

Xara is a graphics program. Think of it like Illustrator, only with less tools, though their versions of those tools are among the most versatile and powerful. I use Xara to create all my maps (and all the finishing touches - borders, grids, labeling), for all of my illustrations, for page layout duties for all my Kaidan and other publications. I'm using it to create all the map tutorials and the guide book design for the products from my recent successful Kickstarter. I use Xara in my graphics shop to design banners, posters, signs, media rich web design, flash, light duty image editing and more. Consider that ProFantasy Software commissioned me to create 189 map objects for the Modern Map Symbol Set, yet all the objects created for that was created in Xara, and had to be converted to CC3 format by ProFantasy's programmers.

Regarding 3D, yes, I use 3D for orthographic (PoV shots) and Sketch can certainly do that for you. 3D is time consuming and complex, and I hate to apply texture maps to 3D objects. Often I create a grayscale version of any 3D object, then apply textures indirectly in Xara as transparent skins over the rendered and shaded 3D object.

While Xara is cheap and easy to use, it's real value is it is very fast to operate, very much not a memory hog so design process is much faster.

What is the benefit of Xara (which is free) over Inkscape? e.g. why use Xara and not Inkscape?

Xara is not free. However, most of my mapping utilizes a heavy use of beveled shapes to emulate depth of terrain. Inkscape has filter effects however doing so, converts the vector shape to low resolution raster, thus you cannot undo it nor make corrections later on (it also has kind of poor results). Xara has the most versatile and robust beveling tools of any software. Xara has powerful transparency tools, 3D extrude, use of Photoshop plug-ins, infinite undo (I can undo processes performed even after I save the file, close the program, open it up again multiple times - and still undo anything ever done). Also it's vector engine is the fastest in the market, redrawing and applying any effect occurs instantly. Redrawing an illustration with a hundred layers or more is quick - so more time is spent creating instead waiting. It also has a limited set of image editing tools built-in or you can directly link an image to Photoshop or GIMP. Also it has robust interface with drawing tablets. 25,000% zoom, and endless other perks.

I actually use Xara Designer Pro 9, which does a lot more than XPGD9, but for mapping XPGD9 can do everything you need. PC Pro magazine awarded XDP9 as the best software of 2013, but I've been using Xara in various iterations since 2004.