Clickable province zones with data on regional/political map, Birthright -- GIS?

[Stuart Miller]

Thanks for the extended response. A few thoughts in reply.

Yes, my tendency towards Visio and surrounding technologies is familiarity. The designer of a drawing needs a license, but the output can be saved as a web page and consumed by anyone. They would not be able to edit the drawing directly. However, updates to the source data (through forms) would flow through, changing shape data (like levels) or even shapes (colors, borders, icons) if conditional formulas were set.

I see the more complete freeform control I could have with your approach. I will need to consider it more. Adding the learning curve to the time investment is an issue. I figured I'd scale my approach in phases.

For the GA comparison, I'm not looking to replace the whole thing. The game includes a lot more than the map. But yeah, I need to break down into more achievable chunks. I can see how redrawing borders automatically would be pretty complex; probably easier to re-shade than change outlines. Roads, trade routes, ley lines would be similarly so, and holding icons probably not very useful anyway. Easier to present that stuff in a window or formatted notes area drawing from the database. The PBEM/PBP games already use some form or other of database and forms, of necessity.

I'll think things over some more and come back to this.

You've said you love the Birthright setting and would like to see more done with it...what would be on your wish list?

[niekell]

Hello Stuart,

Thanks for the extended response.
Verbosity is not something I suffer from a lack of.
Which is as much a curse as a blessing. I'll try to be more succinct.

I see the more complete freeform control I could have with your approach. I will need to consider it more. Adding the learning curve to the time investment is an issue. I figured I'd scale my approach in phases.
Well I'd consider myself a beginner with JQuery, but I am willing to try to answer any questions you may have about how I implemented the dual level maps and selection areas. I used maphilight for the heavy lifting work and that is someone else's code library.

I can see how redrawing borders automatically would be pretty complex;
I think it could be done without too much pain. Initial setup would be a bit complex, but once defined the coords of a province wouldn't change. If my thinking is correct then to merge provinces into a group (county/duchy/principality) would just be a matter of identifying the shared edges (vectors) and eliminating them from the collection of all the provinces in the group. Then it should be just a matter of outputting what is left as a logical sequence of points to encapsulate one area (i.e. no edge-lines/vectors should cross one another). This would also happily cater for the situation where you nab a province which isn't adjacent to your existing lands.

Roads, trade routes, ley lines would be similarly so
Definitely useful to be able to hide/show these on a map. Layers seems to be the answer here, but I don't have the details on how to achieve that... yet. I was thinking about it and really all you'd need was to identify the middle of a province and use that as an endpoint for the leyline, trade-route, or road. For realm management purposes you don't need to know the exact route of any of those, just that the province is covered.

...holding icons probably not very useful anyway. Easier to present that stuff in a window or formatted notes area drawing from the database. The PBEM/PBP games already use some form or other of database and forms, of necessity.
Totally do-able, as the example from birthright.net shows already. Simple to throw data up on screen in tables.

You've said you love the Birthright setting and would like to see more done with it...what would be on your wish list?
I have done the whole realm management side of things (with Excel mostly) as both Player and DM; though it was enjoyable I found it very disjointed for Players used to RPGs and that it edged away from Role-Playing into War-Gaming. I prefer Role-Playing to War-Gaming so I wasn't entirely happy with the change. Having to take that whole "Adventure" action to do modules and major encounters was quite limiting.
For the past ten or more years I've been using the setting as the host world to standard adventuring parties and it works very well for that imo. All the realm information provides a wealth of plot ideas and adventure hooks no matter where you go in all Cerilia. Obviously the resulting campaigns are political heavy as the setting encourages that.
My wishlist does contain the realm management tool you describe, but it is below a "campaign tracking tool". I would like a campaign tracker which has a dashboard which shows all the things I might be asked by a Player. Weather, phase of moon, day of week, upcoming holy days (regional or global), route tracking on a map (with customisable historical fade), calendar/journal, PC character sheet, PC relationships to NPCs and Organisations (preferably a diagram format), all this with the ability to make notes onto a zoomable (either transitional layers or smooth zoom) atlas style map to reflect specific campaign notes (non-canon). Now the only part of that related to Cartographer's Guild is the map with route tracking and custom notes. On that map I'd like to be able to drill down to City Designer (Campaign Cartographer terminology) level so I can make notes on buildings if needed. None of that "campaign tracking tool" needs be Birthright specific in itself, but I would end up using it for my Birthright games anyway.
Do I want to see more done with the BR setting? Absolutely! For me it is like Firefly... it was abandoned why? For the love of whatever god you hold dear, WHY!?!?
I'd love for ALL the domains to have a Player's Secrets booklet done for them. I'd like to see more adventures for the setting. New Awnsheghlien, perhaps evolved from the defeat of old Awnsheghlien such as The Vampire is. The module "Hunt for Bloodsilver" was one of my all-time favourites, and I think it showcased the setting very well. There should be more of that showcasing of why Birthright is such a great setting and what makes it unique/special.

Dang! Succinct... fail! Sorry.

(Oh and don't think I didn't notice you avoided answering my final question! You didn't have to, of course, as is your prerogative, but I was interested in knowing the amount of investment you envisioned having.)

[Stuart Miller]

Far from remarking on the length of your post, I was thanking you for your thoroughness and thoughtfulness. I lack the gift of brevity myself.

Borders -- can you define the lines between connection points on each province (an irregular polygon) to be an object of its own? Would it be easier to manipulate them as objects than as coordinates? I am not familiar with working with vector coordinates yet.

Roads -- yes, most games will just have a generic "Road" asset applied to a province. I think the GA game had it set up so that roads would automatically change to connect to those of adjacent provinces, running through the middle. My brother-in-law created a little tower defense game where roads and rivers auto-connected when placed adjacent another hex containing them.

Campaign Tools
Some interesting things in your "wish list" . Sounds like a GM assist tool that, with the proper inputs (either random tables, or a more complex simulation), could produce weather, lunar and astronomical data, and align with calendars and feasts. It would be nice to see an artist interpret that into a changeable scene, like a banner at the top of a web page. As a GM, it's easy to forget to include interesting details that can enhance play and even affect the story, decisions, or encounters (like rain/snow, twilight, heat/cold, etc).

The "diagramming" of campaign events, character relationships, and so forth sounds like "mind-mapping," for which I believe there are a number of free tools that can be shared and collaborated on.

It seems like there are a number of mapping tools that allow drilling down or linking maps. Some even seem to auto-generate scenes--wilderness or city, for instance, or at least have a city "brush" or "randomizer" that could be used to rapidly build them. Hexographer seemed to have that. It would be great to link that with a medieval demography tool.

I think the challenge is bringing it all together--but I don't think that's even necessarily very challenging anymore, just time consuming. You could pull several tools together on a website and interconnect them, and have a campaign site. The next step is making it reusable, making a template out of it that can have all the back end assumptions customizable per game or setting.

Birthright game
I love the Birthright setting flavor, too, and it allows for one of the best sandbox worlds and most "alive" feeling settings. I love the strategy game aspect of it even more than the adventure scale, though. I agree that it can be difficult to move between them. I'd like a more fluid scaling of the system, since PCs also often want to have smaller scale assets, like a base of operations (hideout, headquarters, tavern, castle), or be part of an organization with some resources. Those exist on a level below the domains and holdings, however. And for a GM, controlling all the NPC stuff in the background is impossible to do in detail; a wider-scale, faction-level system could be helpful there. Ultimately, an "AI" that auto-runs NPC domains could have amazing benefits for both strategic level play and for making the background of the world come alive for adventuring. A big part of the GA game was reacting to the actions of your neighbors, and with the Scene Editor, you could tweak things and even watch the AI resolve things and go at it.

I agree with the Firefly analogy. Hate to see a great story and world abandoned. That's why the fan community at Birthright.net and those who play the online games are so great, though I've noticed it dwindling over the years.

Have you ever played a PBEM or Play-by-Post forum game? I've played in those games off and on for over 10 years, with many of the core community joining, making long-term friendships.

Time investment, map designers and commissions
Do you have any idea how much map designers find reasonable as commissions for building maps? Or at least an order of magnitude range for the time it may take to build some of the great maps we see around here?

I ask because when I think about the amount of time I may have to put into something, I always end up being over ambitious and unrealistic about my availability, considering the many other things competing for my time and my general poor management of it :/ . However, I work a good job that occasionally lets me put in over time, and I sometimes think about how an hour may be more efficiently be used working overtime and paying someone considerably more skilled to take care of something for me (as they can do it faster and better), rather than spending that much more time working at it myself. I do that sometimes with home improvement or fixes. If it's something fairly easy for me or that I consider fun or leisurely, I'll do it myself; but where it's work or tedious, it may be better to work for pay and pay someone else to do it with what I make in the meantime . I think mapping can be fun, but the learning curve + some potentially-tedious aspects make me consider commissioning something...

Realistically, I scrounge out a few hours a week for hobbies I do alone. That's 100+ hours a year (usually not focused on just one thing). And that may diminish as my eldest son is now in kindergarten and starting those extracurriculars that keep parents busy, too.

[niekell]

Hello Stuart.

I lack the gift of brevity myself.
Well that makes the clubhouse busier!

Borders
To automatically figure out which sides/lines of a border to drop when another adjacent province is incorporated (or lost) you'd have to know both ends of the line, both 2d coords. So in effect you do need the work with the line as an object pretty much.

Roads
Easy enough to set the property of the province to be "hasRoad=True" (or similar) but then I would also need to keep adjacency maps. Which is totally possible since provinces don't move... (well except Sideath, but let's not go there for now). Making a adjacency table in a database would be simple as it is just a basic map between province ids.

Campaign Tools
It would be nice to see an artist interpret that into a changeable scene, like a banner at the top of a web page.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and a composite picture like that would be worth even more. Great idea! I was thinking more along the lines of separate widgets (so you could arrange the "dashboard" as you desired, but your idea is more compact and data rich and that is important when screen real-estate is at stake.

As a GM, it's easy to forget to include interesting details that can enhance play and even affect the story, decisions, or encounters (like rain/snow, twilight, heat/cold, etc).
I agree wholeheartedly, some of the most memorable role-playing I've been involved with has been due to environmental conditions. I once ran a solo game for a friend where weather was a vital part of the module's atmosphere. It was dark and breezy in real life, so that helped with immersion, but I knew it was working (all too well) when he literally jumped out of his chair and almost took a swing at my sister who casually came in the door to relay a message from my folks. "Fight or flight" in action there.

I think the challenge is bringing it all together--but I don't think that's even necessarily very challenging anymore, just time consuming.
Yes, I agree that it is more and more becoming a matter of integration rather than outright technical challenge.

I agree with the Firefly analogy. Hate to see a great story and world abandoned. That's why the fan community at Birthright.net and those who play the online games are so great, though I've noticed it dwindling over the years.
I'm a registered member, and have been for some time. I've donated $ as well, but as I'm not a heavy user I've only done that once. I think br.net is an invaluable source of information and discussion. I wouldn't say I'm very active over there though.

Have you ever played a PBEM or Play-by-Post forum game? I've played in those games off and on for over 10 years, with many of the core community joining, making long-term friendships.
I have a friend who lives locally (well same state atm) who had taken part in a couple of the Birthright.net PBEM games. I am always a bit hesitant to take the plunge with something like that in case it then consumed too much of my time. Still curious though. Maybe one day I'll throw my hat in the ring.

Time investment, map designers and commissions
Do you have any idea how much map designers find reasonable as commissions for building maps? Or at least an order of magnitude range for the time it may take to build some of the great maps we see around here?
From what I've read on the forums here it can vary widely. It can depend upon if you have a style in mind or not. If the cartographers are given more free reign on their creative side then you get more interest and that can drive the price down a bit. There are a lot of really good map-makers on this site though. I am amazed by some of their works, and even those which I see and think "I could do that" I often find myself attempting and re-evaluating to "what was I thinking? I can't do that!".
There is a category, or sticky-post maybe, which goes into this in detail. I just don't have the link handy. A search should turn up plenty of hits though.

(Btw, I recently uploaded my first map effort here, it is still a work in progress.)

All the best, niekell.