Hi all!
I'm looking for suggestions about how best to create a map with clickable regions that can be presented on a web page. I'd like to bring to life old D&D Birthright maps (and others) by taking their political maps and enabling players to click on a kingdom or province and then have information displayed. That creates some problematic requirements:
1. Editable layers on top of an overland map (which can be, preferably, an imported base image), with definable borders for provinces and a hierarchy of groupings (provinces within a duchy, duchy within an empire, etc). These borders should be easy to change.
2. Interactive -- click on a defined region, pull up information, preferably linked to an external data source (because the data would frequently change).
3. Able to be hosted on a web page so that many people can interact with it.
I'd love to have GIS-like capabilities, but what limited experience I have with GIS softwares seem pretty strictly tied to real-world map data and may not allow much free form editing of polygons or borders. If there is something, please let me know!
I've also considered game engines or map editors, but again, I'm having trouble meeting the requirements above. It seems like Outerra Anteworld was really heading in this direction, but that project appears abandoned.
The nearest I've considered so far is importing the base image of the overland map into Visio, creating layers over it to draw shapes, and planning to create a web drawing that would bring up shape sheets and hyperlinks on clicks. The data can even be connected to external sources, like Excel, Access, SQL, SharePoint. All stuff I'm familiar with from the business world. BUT, I can't seem to figure out how to create a custom stencil with custom shape data that I can easily trace over the provinces and regions. It seems that a custom stencil creates a single shape and if you want to reuse the data ("Province" with its associated statistics and metadata), you have to reuse the same exact shape, and then painstakingly adjust the shape by all the little control points after (as opposed to just tracing lines in the first place). I'd considered also creating a tiny hex grid overlay and grouping clusters of hexes as province and kingdom objects, though I would have to find a way of making the outlines of the groups boldly visible.
If there's a better way to make Visio work, I'd love that. I'm more familiar with it and more sure that it can ultimately handle the web drawing accessibility and data connections that would make it even more useful, but I'm not tied to it necessarily.
A super bonus round for me would be the ability to drop icons for different levels of cities/holdings on the provinces, or army representations, and then easily move the army units across the map like a wargame (Birthright being part war game). That's one reason I was interested in GIS/Google-maps-like approaches. But that's definitely secondary to the primary goals above.
And yes, this is basically creating an interactive game map.
I'm a n00b, having played around with fantasy maps for rpgs for years, but not heavily. I've done many hand drawn and on FractalMapper and such, but have never devoted lots of time to mastering any one software.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
Thanks!