First of all a big thank you to all of who support me, and there are over 600 hundred of you here on my patreon, thank you all so much, it means the world to me. Especially the last month or so. A fantastic double convention and then a severe case of "con crud" which kept me in bed for over a week. The world Machine 4 started crashing on both my machines, lots going on....

Having your support made it possible for me to be at the convention and also to recover an trying to fix the issues with one of my primary tool.

World Machine 4 Crashes

Lets start with World Machine 4 acting up all of a sudden. WM 4 is one of my main tools used to render large area terrain in high detail. After the last Windows update it started to crash almost every time I tried to use it. After my initial getting upset phase, I tried to switch to a more analytical approach. I filed a report, tested it on my three different machines that has different hardware, reinstalled etc.

After a coupe of days of mucking around by me and the WM's developer the extent of the problem was starting to reigned in and a set of hopefully usable crash dumps where sent. Now there is a good chance that the issue can be found and a solution fixed. It took some vital time but if it can WM4 usable again for me that will be worth it. I still want to use World Machine and see improved versions of it in the future. The market is heating up but WM it is still the best terrain creation tool available, and can stay in top position with updated versions.

GIS

The GIS conversion of my existing Greyhawk map just passed a milestone, all the settlements are added and the roads are nearly done as well. It means the project is still on schedule for a full initial release later this year. It is a huge undertaking but now its on the home stretch with lots of label placing and other more fun bits. An symbol revision will be in the making as well, the village symbols needs a bit of a new touch but the rest are good enough.

An important part of GIS (and most forms of cartography) is to have some soft of referencing system. The Darlene map had the 30 mile hexes with its clunky way of finding its numbers along the edges of the map. I created a 12 mile hex grid with a numbering scheme that covered the Flanaess, but was not really up to covering the whole Oerth so I ditched it for the lates expanded map. Now its time to start looking for how to reference future GIS based maps, using GPS coordinates, simple lat long degrees, custom made hex grid, or something more esoteric like what3words. Lots of options and thanks to the nature of GIS several standards can be used.

Sources Project

I will present a template for my sources project soon, I want to make sure we use some cooperative thinking on what information to gather and how to organize that information before the work starts. With a plan of how to do it, it will be ready to start later this year when the initial data placement is done and we have a first map to work from.

Shield Lands

I've put my Shield Lands Campaign on a hiatus so I can concentrate on catching up on my map making. This will give me a chance to solidify my work flow and create a system of maps to set my standard for how to map things from big to small and properly document it. My goal is to have a comprehensive set of map to both support my gaming in the area and as an platform for my future Greyhawk work.

As a part of this I'm testing out new tools like VTT's and dungeon map makers. so far after testing a dozen or so new (and not so new) promising tools I was just suggested to test "Dragon Map Maker" (https://www.dragonmapmaker.com) and of all the tools I've seen this one seems the most promising, and I will get it, spend a couple of hours testing it and see if it is worth trying to incorporate into my toolbox. It has some really cool features and looks great, the big question for me - is it flexible enough, and is it easy enough to work with..

House Rules

This secret pet project of my has taking shape beyond my humble initial ambitions of tweaking 5E a little more to my liking. During the process I've gotten more and more certain of what I want to do, where I want complexity and where I instead crave simplicity. My needs are for a simple set of rules that somehow carries a lot of fantasy flavor, and keep some compatibility with D&D (spells, monster stats and items).

This was short update on what is going on and more on each of these topics and more is in the works. Next mapping stream is this Friday at 6pm PDT as usual on my Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/anna_b_meyer

Thank you again for all joining me in this journey!! 🙂