Well, this already succeeds at the first hurdle a lot of these TTRPG mapping tools fail on - making it extremely easy to add and remove arbitrary segments of wall. With that, a floor layer, and a bigger icon library this would be able to pretty easily replicate a lot of early D&D maps.
I love it. Just a little enhanced and I would use it regularly.
My primary problem with it seems like you can't move a wall after its placed. Deleting and redrawing instead isn't the biggest deal breaker if it's basically a seamless operation.
As a stopgap I would recommend adding keyboard shortcuts for your tools. If I could 1,2,3,4 to activate those buttons or even Q, W, E, R it would I'd probably have used this for a few hours tonight, haha.
Great work, I think this is a waypoint on the path to a really useful tool, thank you for sharing it.
While I appreciate the idea, it's so primitive that using draw.io (lucidchart) or miro or basically any other diagramming tool with a grid is going to match and exceed the need.
Agreed, my group uses Google Jamboard and for this to be more useful it would at least need to add tokens for all the standard classes/generic baddies as well as replicating pretty much all the other Jamboard features, especially placing images as backgrounds (none of us wants to redraw a map when we have a perfectly good jpeg from the manual already) and something like the laser pointer to aid communication.
Nice, the "divide wall" tool feels oddly satisfying to make doorways with. The drag and drop seems to bug out for moving tokens on the latest Firefox stable.
For a DnD tool that's on the complete other end of the spectrum (aiming for realistic visuals), we've been using https://wildshapevtt.com/ for our D&D 5e sessions for over a year now. It's been great and there's even pre-made maps for the Lost Mines of Phandelver campaign.
This is surprisingly usable in the current form. Nice!
Features I would like to see:
1. Select walls and move them
2. Select a set of lines and change the scale
3. A few different line types - adding double, wavy and thick would help a lot
4. Change line color.
5. A "gametime" mode where the drawn lines are temporarily immutable but tokens can be easily moved around. Flipping between the two modes should be a single click.
6. Change background color of grid squares - this gets you forest and river and mountains, or bushes and streams and rocks.
It's cool, and I feel dickish being like "Someone made a cool thing? Those suckers, we already have cool things", but you could get a lot of the same functionality by building on top of other open-source minimalist diagramming tools, some of which I can see have been mentioned in other comments, and just adding on assets for D&D specific stuff. Like I'm not sure what I could do with this that I can't do with excalidraw.
But in terms of more useful feedback
- The way the canvas expands when a line is close to the edge is very clever. It might be useful if that could be done in real time somehow, so that if you're drawing a long line the canvas can keep up with you
- Some more erase and selection options would be cool, if I have to delete a big structure that I made out of a bunch of tiny line segments I think the only way I can do that is individually clicking them.
- Zoom seems kinda janky for me, that might just be my browser (Desktop Safari). Also if there's a way to pan I couldn't get it to work
Thought it would be a machine learning text to image based on what is being described. Now my brain is stuck on what a speech to text to image model would generate when being driven by a dungeon master.
The ability to draw and connect straight lines is much more fluid than any system design or general drawing tool I've used, very smooth. It would be great to have a free drawing tool on top of this.
The drag function is quite janky insofar as you need to drag then release on an object, then click again to place. It should probably be either click once or hold down lmb.
Being able to import your own images if probably the most essential feature you could add.
On Firefox, adding shapes (the far right-hand side: circle, square, triangle, rectangle) puts the shape in the middle of the map and there it stays--I haven't figured out yet how to move the shapes around or place them somewhere else.
It took me a little while to figure out that the "Select" tool only selects tokens, not walls. Renaming it to "select tokens" or grouping with the token buttons would help.
It's not clear to me what the "radius" of a token is for. At least D&D 5e is played in a non-euclidean space where the diagonal of a 5ft square is the same length as the edges, so a "circle" looks the same as a square. A D&D monster that can attack adjacent spaces can attack all 8 adjacent spaces; a monster with 10ft reach can attack anywhere in the 5×5 square centred on themselves. As a result, your "10ft" radius highlights too few squares, your "15ft" radius highlights too many.
Of course, D&D is not the only game in town, and other systems (or even older versions of D&D) may have different rules you're more familiar with, so this isn't necessarily a "bug" but I figured I should mention it.
Tokens and very basic walls with flawless click drag seems like all you need to make useful tool eventually, but...
Windows, Firefox 99.0.1. Click drag on tokens is inconsistent and broken, and the edit token popup shows up on mouse-down, I'd expect it on click (down + up on same token) and not show at all if I drag.
on firefox the drag detection is broken- once you drag, it sticks to the cursor until you click again, instead of on mouseup like you'd expect- seems like part of the drag event is captured by an offscreen element or something?
also the sign given by the 'angle' readout for shapes seems a bit odd
Would be cool to have resize handles on the shapes, and allow the shapes to go over buildings and tokens so they can be used to cover areas that aren't revealed yet.
crooked-v|3 years ago
McNutty|3 years ago
MrLeap|3 years ago
My primary problem with it seems like you can't move a wall after its placed. Deleting and redrawing instead isn't the biggest deal breaker if it's basically a seamless operation.
As a stopgap I would recommend adding keyboard shortcuts for your tools. If I could 1,2,3,4 to activate those buttons or even Q, W, E, R it would I'd probably have used this for a few hours tonight, haha.
Great work, I think this is a waypoint on the path to a really useful tool, thank you for sharing it.
breakfastduck|3 years ago
ghostly_s|3 years ago
johncs|3 years ago
malikNF|3 years ago
How exactly though?
Wish there was some kind of link on the message where you can submit feedback.
z33k|3 years ago
For a DnD tool that's on the complete other end of the spectrum (aiming for realistic visuals), we've been using https://wildshapevtt.com/ for our D&D 5e sessions for over a year now. It's been great and there's even pre-made maps for the Lost Mines of Phandelver campaign.
dsr_|3 years ago
Features I would like to see:
1. Select walls and move them
2. Select a set of lines and change the scale
3. A few different line types - adding double, wavy and thick would help a lot
4. Change line color.
5. A "gametime" mode where the drawn lines are temporarily immutable but tokens can be easily moved around. Flipping between the two modes should be a single click.
6. Change background color of grid squares - this gets you forest and river and mountains, or bushes and streams and rocks.
jordanpg|3 years ago
cicadawings|3 years ago
But in terms of more useful feedback
- The way the canvas expands when a line is close to the edge is very clever. It might be useful if that could be done in real time somehow, so that if you're drawing a long line the canvas can keep up with you
- Some more erase and selection options would be cool, if I have to delete a big structure that I made out of a bunch of tiny line segments I think the only way I can do that is individually clicking them.
- Zoom seems kinda janky for me, that might just be my browser (Desktop Safari). Also if there's a way to pan I couldn't get it to work
geuis|3 years ago
batch12|3 years ago
derekja|3 years ago
AQuantized|3 years ago
The drag function is quite janky insofar as you need to drag then release on an object, then click again to place. It should probably be either click once or hold down lmb.
Being able to import your own images if probably the most essential feature you could add.
imranq|3 years ago
meristohm|3 years ago
site-packages1|3 years ago
davidkuennen|3 years ago
rythmshifter|3 years ago
betterburnout|3 years ago
Tepix|3 years ago
Some criticism: Moving the position of a player icon on the map is non-intuitive.
gigamick|3 years ago
thristian|3 years ago
It's not clear to me what the "radius" of a token is for. At least D&D 5e is played in a non-euclidean space where the diagonal of a 5ft square is the same length as the edges, so a "circle" looks the same as a square. A D&D monster that can attack adjacent spaces can attack all 8 adjacent spaces; a monster with 10ft reach can attack anywhere in the 5×5 square centred on themselves. As a result, your "10ft" radius highlights too few squares, your "15ft" radius highlights too many.
Of course, D&D is not the only game in town, and other systems (or even older versions of D&D) may have different rules you're more familiar with, so this isn't necessarily a "bug" but I figured I should mention it.
Falell|3 years ago
Windows, Firefox 99.0.1. Click drag on tokens is inconsistent and broken, and the edit token popup shows up on mouse-down, I'd expect it on click (down + up on same token) and not show at all if I drag.
smegsicle|3 years ago
also the sign given by the 'angle' readout for shapes seems a bit odd
vgel|3 years ago
cloudking|3 years ago