RPGMapMaker for Mac

From Francois Menneteau:

RPGMapMaker is a tool for drawing maps with polygonal grids. These kinds of maps are used in Role Playing Games, but of course can be designed for any other purposes. In addition to having most of the capabilities of a real painting program (such as multi-documents, lines, rectangles, ovals and round rectangles, drawing and filling with color and pattern, text, rubber, pipettes tools, etc.), RPGMapMaker has also unique features that greatly simplify the building of this kind of map, such as:

• Various kinds of grids. You can create a grid map made of hexes (well suited for world, region or village maps), or with squares (well suited for dungeon maps) or with lozenges (well suited for pseudo-3D castle and dungeon maps).
• Seven layers static map. One layer for the grid, three pre allocated layers (one for color and drawing, one for terrain tiles and one for text and lines). Also three extra layers (also one for drawing, one for terrain tiles and one for text and lines) can be allocated on demand. For example you can change a polygon color without loosing the terrain that lies on top of it, build a map for the DM eyes only and a map for his players, etc.
• Interactive maps. Static maps can be linked between each others like in a hyper text document. This allows you for example to design a continent, then zoom-in to a country, then zoom-in to a city, then zoom-in to a house, then zoom-in to the cellar of the house, then zoom-in to the dungeon beneath the house, then zoom-in... Of course, you can also zoom-out.
• Layers manager. It allows you to allocate and free the three extra layers, to choose which layer is visible and which layer is not, and select which layer is the active one (an active layer is a layer where drawing occurs).
• Various dimension units. You can specify the map dimensions in either cm or m or km. Alternatively, you may prefer to use the ft, ya or mi dimension units.
• Grid polygon color filling in just two clicks (three if using patterns). One selects the color and one selects the filling area.
• Predefined terrains tiles. RPGMapMaker comes with several predefined libraries for building regions, villages, castles and dungeons. They are available in either black and white or in colors.
• Terrains editor. If you do not like the terrain tiles and wish to modify them, the terrain editor goes here for that purpose. Of course, if you are talented, you can also create terrain tiles from thin air!
• Terrain Organizer. This tool allows you to quickly reorganize a terrain library and transfer tiles between libraries.
• Random terrain generator. This tool allows you to generate random terrains made of up to four differents "regions" (for example water,mountain, plain, etc.).
• Random maze generator. This tool allows you to generate random mazes, caverns and dungeons. For dungeons, rooms number can be generated.
• Notes Window. This floating window allows you to add notes to your maps. For example, this lets you add comments about a specific areas, store information such as monsters statistics, etc. You can also merge all the notes (or only some of them) into one big note. You can then print this big note or copy it into an other program.
• Line with arrows of various shapes. Also, you can add a distance between the ends of a line. The distance is automatically adjusted when you change the map dimension units.
• Drawing contexts. You can memorize up to 40 foreground colors, background colors and patterns for further utilization.
• Textures. This pallet allows you to use the Color Filling and Grid Polygon Color Filling tools with textures instead of Drawing Contexts.
• Selective drag or clear. As the map is made of seven layers, you can specify which map layer(s) you want to drag or clear.
• Intelligent copy and paste. As the map is made of seven layers, you can specify which active layer (or a portion of it) you want to transfer into the clipboard and on which active layer you want to paste the clipboard contents.
• Intelligent external drop. You can choose the portion of an external drop to insert into the chosen active layer.
• Multiple levels of Undo. By default, the application is configured with 16 levels of undo, but if you need more levels this can be changed in the application preferences.
• Models. Using a special script, you can create maps with a predefined appearance for the grid layer (a grid with a legend for example). In addition, you can further modify the script to alter the grid layer appearance..
• Layer Scripts. You can attach a script to a layer. This script contains directives that allow you drawing into the layer as if you were using drawing tools. At present, however, only strings drawing is supported.