Visual / Map Combat Program

[James West 659]

Has anyone seen a good visual combat program around ?

I've found something called VCS at http://zoe.ipgn.com.au/vcs/vcs-win.zip ... it does dual screens, icons etc but it's not very map pretty.

DM genie seems complete but doesnt do mapping or the like.

The only bit that I really hate about dungeon crawls is the constant redrawing of the player map.

PS: I wasnt sure if this was the right area to put this so forgive me if I got it wrong

[DocRoc]

I use gametable, myself. It's nice and free. Also fast and easy.

[fanguad]

Check out MapTools as well. MapTools also has a nice series of tutorials to get you up and running.

[evilash]

fanguad wrote:

Check out MapTools as well.

Fixed the link.

[SquirrelyOgre]

fanguad wrote:

Check out MapTools as well. MapTools also has a nice series of tutorials to get you up and running.

If I could second and third this, then consider it done! Our groups love MT. It's JAVA-based for any finicky OS a gamer chooses to run, simple to use, and did I mention simple to use? Slick interface, comes bundled with a number of useful tools, even character-icon chat, impersonation, toggle keys to show which NPC is speaking...

Map capabilities are great, with a variable-opacity Fog of War, tiling features, adjustable grid, DM-view versus Player-view toggles, and some decent free-drawing capabilities. Some of my favorites are the distance measurement tool for movement and the radius tool, to easily show the AoE for spells.

Did I mention free?

[Robert Miller 55]

Yeah, Love Maptools, I would love it even more if I could figure out how to port forward through my router. Fortunately 3 of the other 10 or so guys I game with on line are able to do it.

[Dark Minstrel]

Can you use Dundjinni maps with Maptools? Also, has anyone tried Fantasy Grounds? If so which do you prefer?

[Pax Veritas]

If someone can tell me a little about the technical downloading and set up required for GM and players... I'm interested in MapTools also.

[Robert Miller 55]

Pax Veritas wrote:

If someone can tell me a little about the technical downloading and set up required for GM and players... I'm interested in MapTools also.

Well, the hardest part about Maptools is figuring out if you can port forwarding.

After that the hardest thing is probably figuring out writing macros.

There is the easy version, brackets [ ], within those brackets your write what you want determined.

Say I have a to hit roll with +5 to hit, and the dmage is 3d4+3, I write the macro for the individual token, or in your global macros, like this: [1d20+5 + 3d4+3]

Then from then on I only hit that macro button for that to hit roll.

Then there are much more complex ways you can learn to set up macros, which when done is actually easier to implement and use, but requires greater up front understanding and time writing and setting them up.

For maps I usually just import them from pretty much any source. I prefer to change them to .png format whenever I can though.