Intro + Sizeable Add-on for OWM

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Mark Oliva
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Intro + Sizeable Add-on for OWM

Post by Mark Oliva » Sun Sep 01, 2019 2:25 am

Greetings from Northern Bavaria!

This is my first appearance here ... so, a quick introduction.

I'm the head of a 3-man RPG team called The Vintyri™ Project. Before anyone thinks I'm out to grab your money, let me assure you that we're a non-profit organization. We sell nothing. We do no kickstarters. We neither solicit nor accept donations. Our products are free on an open gaming, open source basis and are licensed for personal and commercial use.

The focal point of the Vintyri Project is the RPG gaming material that we produce, specifically the Dungeons Daring™ fantasy role-playing game and the Jörðgarð™ campaign setting. These products are off the cartographic track, so that's as many words as I'll lose over them here. If anyone wants to know more, go to https://www.vintyri.org.

These products require a lot of maps. We have more than 500 already, which are available free online. When we began this mapping, we had to conclude that many of the mapping objects we needed in the bitmap quality that we needed were not available anywhere. As a result, we created our own Vintyri Cartographic Collection with about 1,500 features (symbols, objects) and textures (fills). We then acquired license rights that allow us to distribute more than 20,000 bitmap cartographic objects produced by others, all free and for personal and commercial use.

We subsequently released four add-ons in versions for Fractal Mapper 8™, Campaign Cartographer 3+™ and Dundjinni™. That brings me to the reason why we bought an expansion license for OWM and why I'm popping up here. My colleagues, Carl Nielsen and Trevor Cooke, and I are quite impressed with the basic mapping system of OWM although we do see some things that we consider to be serious shortcomings. In the next time to come, I'll discuss those in these forums.

Meanwhile, we are looking seriously at making and releasing OWM versions of all four of our free add-ons. Our decision will depend on whether Three Minds makes some improvements in OWM to make our products work better in the program and what kind of response we get from OWM users in terms of feedback and download statistics. One does, of course, need something to download and something to which one can give feedback before that can be realized.

Therefore, we have released a first alpha version of the Vintyri Cartograhic Collection for OWM. The attached graphic is a very quick and dirty (i.e. cartographically unprofessional) example of what one can do with it.

There is a PDF installation and usage guide. I strongly urge you to download and use it during the installation of the add-on. It will help you get a problem-free installation and it also will show you what tools are in the package and how to get at them in OWM.

The Guide is available here:

https://www.vintyri.org/downloads/vintyri_owm_guide.pdf (2.6 MB)

The add-on is available here:

https://www.vintyri.org/downloads/vcc_owm_alpha1.zip (490 MB)

Download it, unzip it and run Setup.exe. Install it into:

(Install drive and location)\Three Minds Software\Other World Mapper

If you used the default installation location, that's:

C:\Programs (x86)\Three Minds Software\Other World Mapper

This products all are released on a free, open gaming, open source products for personal and commercial usage.

NOTE: The building made with the text tag building tool was made with the OWM building tool, using a Vintyri roof texture. It's quite compatible with the basic Vintyri style. We also used frills from the Vintyri feature catalog Building Parts to customize it.

Servus,

Mark Oliva
The Vintyri Project
https://www.vintyri.org
mailto:info@vintyri.org
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Kanchou
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Re: Intro + Sizeable Add-on for OWM

Post by Kanchou » Sun Sep 01, 2019 7:41 pm

Mark Oliva wrote:Greetings from Northern Bavaria!

This is my first appearance here ... so, a quick introduction.
Welcome to our forums! :)
Mark Oliva wrote: Meanwhile, we are looking seriously at making and releasing OWM versions of all four of our free add-ons. Our decision will depend on whether Three Minds makes some improvements in OWM to make our products work better in the program and what kind of response we get from OWM users in terms of feedback and download statistics. One does, of course, need something to download and something to which one can give feedback before that can be realized.

Therefore, we have released a first alpha version of the Vintyri Cartograhic Collection for OWM. The attached graphic is a very quick and dirty (i.e. cartographically unprofessional) example of what one can do with it.

There is a PDF installation and usage guide. I strongly urge you to download and use it during the installation of the add-on. It will help you get a problem-free installation and it also will show you what tools are in the package and how to get at them in OWM.
I was able to download and install the add-on without trouble and it's really cool! Really happy you guys decided to give this a try.

When you are ready, let us know and we can share the link and info via our social media so that more of our users are aware of your project and this OWM friendly add-on.

Respect to improvements and changes to OWM, just let us know what you think could be better and what functionality we could add. We try to add as much of the feedback we receive into Other World Mapper as long as it's not outside the scope of what we are trying to do (i.e. random world generation, 3D rendering is beyond the scope).

Also, let us know if you have any questions about how OWM works in general or about resources in OWM.

Looking forward to the other add-ons and your feedback!

- Alejandro
Alejandro S. Canosa
Three Minds Software

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Mark Oliva
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Re: Intro + Sizeable Add-on for OWM

Post by Mark Oliva » Wed Sep 04, 2019 6:45 am

Thanks to the Other World Mapper users who downloaded the VCC 1st alpha and sent us error reports in the last few days. Other than our spelling of "Cartographic" as "Cartgographic" in the Setup program, the errors all were in missing and wrong textures.

We've fixed that and have uploaded a second alpha version now. Those who want it and who haven't downloaded yet should go here:

https://www.vintyri.org/downloads/vcc_owm_alpha1.zip (430 MB)

Those who already installed the first alpha should go for this patch instead:

https://www.vintyri.org/downloads/vcc_owm_patch_1.zip (300 KB)

Updaters need to:

1. Unzip the file into a temporary folder. It contains a folder named Templates and a PDF file.

2. Read the PDF file to see how to install the patch.

The full Other World Mapper version of manual for the collection now is available too. It not only has installation instructions but also is chock full of information:

https://www.vintyri.org/downloads/Vinty ... 0Guide.zip (PDF - 24 MB)

Where from here? We'll take this release through beta to full release and then issue one more product that will add dungeon material. After that, we'll look at whether there's enough interest to warrant releasing the rest of our products in OWM format.

Servus,
Mark Oliva
The Vintyri™ Project
https://www.vintyri.org
info@vintyri.org

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Mark Oliva
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Re: Intro + Sizeable Add-on for OWM

Post by Mark Oliva » Fri Sep 06, 2019 4:49 am

Kanchou wrote:When you are ready, let us know and we can share the link and info via our social media so that more of our users are aware of your project and this OWM friendly add-on.
Greetings. I avoid social media like the black plague, but you're free to link for the Vintyri Cartographic Collection and Bogie's Mapping Objects anytime you want. We're interested mainly in response, to see if porting our add-ons to OWM is interesting enough to your users to make more work worthwhile.

Re: Your posting at CG on picking up the installation folder from the registry:

I use an older version of our installer (AI), which doesn't give me that option.

Servus,
Mark Oliva
The Vintyri™ Project
https://www.vintyri.org
info@vintyri.org

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Kanchou
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Re: Intro + Sizeable Add-on for OWM

Post by Kanchou » Tue Sep 17, 2019 12:42 am

Mark Oliva wrote: Greetings. I avoid social media like the black plague, but you're free to link for the Vintyri Cartographic Collection and Bogie's Mapping Objects anytime you want. We're interested mainly in response, to see if porting our add-ons to OWM is interesting enough to your users to make more work worthwhile.
Servus,
I've been following your posts, and this is really really cool! Very happy you guys are making your assets available for OWM users :)

I need to properly try the latest you uploaded and properly reply, we are at the very end of regression testing (please let it be so!) and I'll have a bit more time once that's finished.

I do have a question/request. Is there/can there be a simple "landing page" we can share? I don't want to share the download links directly, but I couldn't find a link in your website with the list of OWM downloads.

Thank you!

- Alejandro
Alejandro S. Canosa
Three Minds Software

nDervish
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Re: Intro + Sizeable Add-on for OWM

Post by nDervish » Tue Sep 17, 2019 3:48 am

Mark Oliva wrote:Download it, unzip it and run Setup.exe.
Does the setup program do anything other than copying files from the zip archive to the proper directories for OWM to find them? If it's reasonably possible to install the assets manually (i.e., without using the setup program), I would encourage you to also include manual installation instructions, for the sake of those using OWM on non-Windows platforms.
Kanchou wrote:we are at the very end of regression testing (please let it be so!)
There is no end to regression testing, only brief breaks until the next change is implemented or the next release is planned.

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Mark Oliva
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Re: Intro + Sizeable Add-on for OWM

Post by Mark Oliva » Tue Sep 17, 2019 4:28 am

nDervish wrote:Does the setup program do anything other than copying files from the zip archive to the proper directories for OWM to find them? If it's reasonably possible to install the assets manually (i.e., without using the setup program), I would encourage you to also include manual installation instructions, for the sake of those using OWM on non-Windows platforms.
I hadn't thought about people using Macs & Linux. As soon as I have some time, I'll make some ZIPs that can copy direct.

Servus,
Mark Oliva
The Vintyri™ Project
https://www.vintyri.org
info@vintyri.org

nDervish
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Re: Intro + Sizeable Add-on for OWM

Post by nDervish » Wed Sep 18, 2019 4:02 am

Mark Oliva wrote:
nDervish wrote:Does the setup program do anything other than copying files from the zip archive to the proper directories for OWM to find them? If it's reasonably possible to install the assets manually (i.e., without using the setup program), I would encourage you to also include manual installation instructions, for the sake of those using OWM on non-Windows platforms.
I hadn't thought about people using Macs & Linux. As soon as I have some time, I'll make some ZIPs that can copy direct.
Thanks!

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Kanchou
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Re: Intro + Sizeable Add-on for OWM

Post by Kanchou » Wed Sep 18, 2019 10:12 pm

nDervish wrote:There is no end to regression testing, only brief breaks until the next change is implemented or the next release is planned.
You know how to make a grown man cry. Well, a least a software engineer :D.

We've been trying to do more frequent releases with less changes at once so regression is not so rough, but we always get too excited about adding changes.

- Alejandro
Alejandro S. Canosa
Three Minds Software

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