Show HN: Dungeon Map Doodler Beta - Free online map drawing tool

[toddrossdiy]

This is a D&D map making tool I've been working on for a while now, but I just added some new features to the beta that I think HN users might find neat. When building a world map, you can use "Dynamic Brushes" to draw organic looking terrain. This is achieved entirely with svg filters and javascript canvas, no fancy libraries or anything. This came with a pretty large rewrite of some of the underlying code, so I'm sure there's a number of bugs I haven't come across, but I'd love to hear your opinions on it!

[ldd]

I have never played D&D (despite wanting to) but I really liked what you did.

It seems very well-made, though I bet people would appreciate one or two youtube tutorials (it seems very feature rich btw).You should try posting it on reddit and other sites to get more feedback.

Congrats!

[drusepth]

I love this tool (and recommend it to some of my DM users quite often, and also added it to Fiction.Tools recently for writers to stumble upon). I've never used it for a D&D game, but I have used it from time to time to build out scaled maps for writing in. Very cool to see it getting constant updates; can't wait to check them out!

[SubiculumCode]

Always love new TTRPG tools!! I would love a paragraph about what differentiates this tool from the well known online alternatives. For example: https://app.dungeonscrawl.com/

[toddrossdiy]

So funny thing actually, me and him started working on our sites on almost the exact same day! We both saw some things on Twitter near the start of the pandemic that prompted us to begin these. I know he’s been working hard on a v2 of his site lately, but I took a long break from working on mine and haven’t really been following what others have been up to. Since I’ve been compared to Dungeon Scrawl quite a bit over time, I always said that his felt like it was trying to be a professional tool like Photoshop, with a really complex and powerful interface. I was trying to be more like Paint, a program that anybody can open up and figure out 90% of it just by poking around for a couple minutes.

Between the different drawing tools, the dynamic brushes, the style presets and texture options, you can create a pretty wide variety of maps with it. I know a lot of map making tools create maps with a very obvious style to them, but mine gives you a lot of flexibility while still taking just a few clicks to make it happen.

Hope you have fun playing around with it!

[kimixa]

FYI on a slightly older (but likely "still fast") laptop using a 6700hq on chrome & windows 10 (latest updates, latest drivers) I scribbled for a second on an otherwise blank "medium" map with the free draw tool, and the entire viewport went blank and fans ramped up to 100%.

A cool idea, but I'm still not really sold on apparently heavyweight apps in-browser as they seem to end up with a lot of similar issues.

[toddrossdiy]

Thanks for the feedback! I absolutely agree, the performance hit that these new svg filters created is a bit more than I'd prefer, I'm hoping to find ways to optimize it further. If you feel like it, would you mind testing in Firefox as well? Also, does the current version at dungeonmapdoodler.com/draw work smoothly for you? I'm still trying to nail down exactly why it still runs like crap on some fairly powerful hardware, but then runs great on other slower machines. My own desktop had a 10 year old graphics card up until a month or two ago, and this ran smoothly on it, but a comparably powerful desktop with modern, but integrated graphics runs it at like 3 fps.

[Aperocky]

I love the dungeon mode and its custom generation, but it seems missing for world map, have you thought about using `simplex-noise` to generate a completely random world? for example https://aperocky.com/hydrosim

And performance does seem to suffer quite a lot on my M1 air.

[toddrossdiy]

Yeah, I haven't built a world generation tool yet, but that link you made seems really cool! I've played around with perlin noise in the past, but never simplex. I'll have to check it out, thanks for the suggestion!

I actually haven't tested it on a mac before, so thanks for letting me know. I just looked at it in Safari and apparently they still don't support svg filters even on desktop, so the app is unfortunately broken there

[Aeolun]

What does this do? The moment I open it my fans launch into airplane mode, and the website runs at 5fps... (Firefox on Pop OS)

[toddrossdiy]

Sorry to hear that! Unfortunately the new svg filter stuff requires hardware acceleration to work at any decent speed on a computer. I haven’t nailed down the exact reasons that make it available or not, but in general, integrated graphics don’t seem to handle it too well. The current public release should still work well for you if you check out dungeonmapdoodler.com/draw, and once I release these new changes, I plan to keep that older version available to use for people who can’t run this one on their computer

[kerv]

It's cool, but I lost my whole map I drew when I accidentally double clicked and the site crashed.

[toddrossdiy]

Sorry to hear that! How big was the map you made? Images can get pretty large which used up a fair bit of ram, and I’ve found that if you overwhelm a computer, it tends to just make the screen go white and lock up, but I haven’t found a good solution to that other than warning the user on creation of larger sized maps

[Narishma]

It shouldn't be using CPU resources when nothing is happening.

[toddrossdiy]

Define nothing happening. I’ve made a lot of performance improvements to avoid redrawing anything that isn’t necessary, but it’s still drawing your mouse cursor constantly among other things, you wouldn’t expect any other drawing tool to drop to 0% cpu while open, would you? I absolutely agree it’s got some issues still, but I can’t just fully remove the draw loop cause then it’s not software any more, just a picture

[cbdumas]

Very cool, thanks for sharing!

[JenrHywy]

I have several children who will love this. Thanks!

[airstrike]

This is too cool

[podiki]

Nice work, thanks for sharing!