toddrossdiy's comments

toddrossdiy | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: Dungeon Map Doodler Beta - Free online map drawing tool

Like I said, I'm using an animation loop, so of course it's going to keep doing things while the user isn't actively interacting. I fully agree there's ways to still improve it, and I might look into switching to entirely event based refreshing, but the 100% cpu core is due to your web browser being unable to offload the svg filters to your gpu. Maybe that's due to your gpu, maybe it's your operating system or web browser that's the problem, I don't know, but that's why people release things as a beta before fully releasing something. Hopefully I can work out most of those kinks, and people giving helpful feedback during beta makes that a lot easier!

For another data point, on my half decent desktop, it uses about 10% cpu and 20% gpu

toddrossdiy | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: Dungeon Map Doodler Beta - Free online map drawing tool

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

toddrossdiy | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: Dungeon Map Doodler Beta - Free online map drawing tool

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.

toddrossdiy | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: Dungeon Map Doodler Beta - Free online map drawing tool

Ah that's interesting then, I wonder if it's a linux specific issue with hardware acceleration? I know anything that's unable to offload the svg filters to the gpu runs terribly, and it makes the cpu spike to 100%. I'm hoping that browsers improve in the long run, but I'm also hoping I can figure out some ways to make it run better than it currently does.

toddrossdiy | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: Dungeon Map Doodler Beta - Free online map drawing tool

While I don't fully disagree with that, I just opened up Gimp and moving my mouse around made the cpu spike. That's with no brush selected or anything, just the default select tool and a completely blank screen. And yes, you can absolutely get more performance out of a native app than a web app, an editor built in javascript will always be less performant than one built in C++ or whatever something like Photoshop or Gimp is made in. That was a tradeoff I made to make something that was available to a wider audience instead of being locked down to a particular operating system.

I'm sure there's more improvements I could make on performance, maybe I could switch to only drawing the mouse cursor on the mousemove event rather than using the animation loop, but then when you're tweaking values in the menus, you won't see your changes in real time any more. It's all a balance, and this is just something I do in my spare time, I'd rather have fun building some new features than seeing my cpu usage drop by a percentage point.

toddrossdiy | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: Dungeon Map Doodler Beta - Free online map drawing tool

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

toddrossdiy | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: Dungeon Map Doodler Beta - Free online map drawing tool

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

toddrossdiy | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: Dungeon Map Doodler Beta - Free online map drawing tool

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

toddrossdiy | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: Dungeon Map Doodler Beta - Free online map drawing tool

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!

toddrossdiy | 3 years ago | on: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds

I've been working on a dungeon map making tool for a while as well. It was originally intended for whipping up a really quick map, but it's expanded a fair bit since then, and I'm currently working on adding tools for world maps as well. Check it out here if you're interested!

https://dungeonmapdoodler.com/

toddrossdiy | 3 years ago | on: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

My decision was based on "Google owns Motorola, therefore something considered a flagship phone at the time of buying it should be supported for longer than a year". In my opinion, that's some excellent criteria for buying a phone, just a shame that Google treats everything they do, even owning large companies like a beta test, and shuts things down on a whim whenever they feel like it. Honestly my best android phone was a Xiaomi Note 3, cost less than 300 bucks and performed great up until the day I replaced it. Not sure if they still make phones as well as they used to, but I'd give them another try if I ever went back to Android

toddrossdiy | 3 years ago | on: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

That's fair, but when I buy a laptop made by Lenovo or Dell or whatever, that doesn't prevent me from upgrading Windows to a new version, so why is that the case with Android? (I know the real answer to this, but really, how is this still a problem?) If I bought a google pixel phone, would they support it with new versions for 5+ years? Just sucks that no android phone manufacturers have any incentive to try and keep a phone up to date for more than a year or two any more.

toddrossdiy | 3 years ago | on: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

I was a big fan and supporter of Android all the way from version 2.2 up to version 8. The final straw was when my brand new 800 dollar motorola phone, which was owned by google at the time stopped getting updates barely a year after I bought it. I also noticed that everything I liked about Android was slowly being stripped away, and Apple was slowly adding all the things I felt were missing. Still not the biggest fan of the fact that I have no headphone jack, but I'm still getting updates on my now 4 year old iphone, it didn't cost me any more than my last android did, and overall it just works so much better for me. Not everything is due to status symbols and affordability

toddrossdiy | 5 years ago | on: Dungeon Map Doodler – Draw maps with ease

Hey everyone, this is just a little project I've been working on for the last 2 months or so in my free time. It's a simple to use map drawing tool for games like D&D and other tabletop RPGs. It's still very much in development, but let me know what you think!