FT PRG Making campaign maps with ftmap

For those interested in campaign maps - this is just a thought
but the ftmap game mapping utility can be use to create star
maps.

You just need to create some graphics for the stars and labels
then work out their coordinates. It will take colour images
and uses their transparency settings.

You could use actual star positions on a coordinate,
The scale could be ly or parsecs.

If you type in the coords and naming data in the ftmap file
it will produce a high resolution map in the universally
readable GIF format and label all the stars for you.

Too apply campaign labels such "here be dragons" you can either
create an image label to place at the required label position
as a normal game object (but it will try to label the label so give it
a null name) or annotate the background image directly (preferred)

If you feel really keen you could get a picture of a spiral
galaxy such as M100 from the hubble archives and use it as
a background for the map and place the stars appropriately.
Any background should be scaled to fix the final map resolution
of it will be stretched (and muck up your labels)

The beauty is that you can vary the background image and hence
the campaign setting, then 'standard' stars can be re-overlaid.

ftmap runs on Unix & W95/NT systems and can probably be compiled
for the Mac too as the code is portable.

download ftmap from here:-

http://www.yorvic.york.ac.uk/~hodgson/newweb/ftmap_download.html

read about ftmap here:-

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Station/3565/ftmap.html

If you need advice email me tim.jones@smallworld.co.uk

tim jones
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