MarkOliva

02/27/2009

1586

Before anyone thinks that I'm trying to advertise and make some money here, please consider that the Vintyri™ Project is 100% committed to producing free and open gaming products. We don't sell anything. Everything we create is free. That's why our website has an .org address instead of .com.

Continuing with my comments to Jonathan Fischer in the last entry: We will be releasing the Vintyri Cartographic Collection No. 1 this year (free) to FM8 cartographers. The focus is on raster mapping rather than vector mapping. The collection right now is about 40% completed. It will include:

1. About 1,000 raster symbols of buildings, building parts (chimneys, dormers, etc.) and building externals (sheds, outhouses, stacks of firewood). These buildings will be available with roofs of light-colored clay tile, dark-colored clay tile, slate and wooden shingle. The four representations of a communal brewery from the Middle Ages above should give you a picture of what we're doing.

2. A collection of FM8 basic roof maps (.fmp) in all four types that you can use to make your own symbols.

3. An illustrated PDF that will tell you how to map with FM8 on a raster basis in the Vintyri style. This book is a necessary part of our project work. We already have released the free and open Dungeons Daring™ RPG (mapped and illustrated with FM8) and we now are building the free and open Jörðgarð™ campaign setting for Dungeons Daring which also is being mapped with FM8.

One of the ideas behind our work is that any game master who uses our game and/or campaign setting should be able to modify it to his or her heart's content. Therefore, we also released a completely editable reference document for Dungeons Daring, containing all of the open game material in the PDFs in modifiable form. We will do the same with the Jörðgarð books and the FM8 maps that we've made for Jörðgarð, so that any user can customize our maps as well as our texts.

That's the reason that we have to do the PDF tutorial book. If you don't know how we make our FM8 maps, you might not be able to customize them as you wish. This PDF will go into great detail on how we map things and why, and it also will show you how to use FM8 and then the free and open Paint.NET program to create your own FM8 raster symbols. (Don't be afraid! It's easy!)

Once we create a symbol in FM8, we export it as a PNG and then call it up in Paint.NET to retouch it and to define the transparent areas. If the latter term means nothing to you, look at the brewery images above. The brewery symbols aren't rectangular. They have an irregular form. However, if you put any of these symbols on one of your maps, there will be no white background where the roofs jag in and out. Those are the transparent areas of the symbol. Among many other things, our tutorial will teach you how to do this - remember, it's easy!

I can't give you an exact release date. Our work tempo depends upon the amount of "free time" we have. But a rough guess would put a release sometime between June and August.

If you want to make a sample test run with these brewery symbols, download the ZIP file below and unzip it into your FM8 MapArt folder. That will add a selection to your FM8 symbol menu called "Vintyri Collections." Under that, you'll find the brewery symbols under "Brewery Samples." Feel free to go ahead and use these symbols if you wish. They're released under the Open Game License 1.0a, which also is in the "Brewery Samples" folder.

If you like them and want more such building symbols, you can download our free Dungeons Daring Collection 2 of symbols for FM8. It will give you 35 more such symbols free and ready for use under the OGL. To get the collection, go to:

www.dungeons-daring.org

In the left column menu, click "Public Downloads." That will take you there. Ignore the Dungeons Daring Collection 1. It's a primitive, outdated version of Collection 2.

Mark Oliva
The Vintyri™ Project
info@dungeons-daring.org