from Hacker News

My mate is making a tool for DnD players to quickly visualise scenarios

by gigamick on 4/14/22, 10:23 AM with 31 comments

• by crooked-v on 4/16/22, 10:49 PM

  Well, this already succeeds at the first hurdle a lot of these TTRPG mapping tools fail on - making it extremely easy to add and remove arbitrary segments of wall. With that, a floor layer, and a bigger icon library this would be able to pretty easily replicate a lot of early D&D maps.

• by McNutty on 4/17/22, 12:34 AM

  Is it supposed to work on mobile/touch? Because if so I can't figure out the controls

• by MrLeap on 4/17/22, 2:37 AM

  I love it. Just a little enhanced and I would use it regularly.

  My primary problem with it seems like you can't move a wall after its placed. Deleting and redrawing instead isn't the biggest deal breaker if it's basically a seamless operation.

  As a stopgap I would recommend adding keyboard shortcuts for your tools. If I could 1,2,3,4 to activate those buttons or even Q, W, E, R it would I'd probably have used this for a few hours tonight, haha.

  Great work, I think this is a waypoint on the path to a really useful tool, thank you for sharing it.

• by breakfastduck on 4/17/22, 2:22 AM

  While I appreciate the idea, it's so primitive that using draw.io (lucidchart) or miro or basically any other diagramming tool with a grid is going to match and exceed the need.

• by johncs on 4/16/22, 11:12 PM

  Seems to be going after the same problems that https://shmeppy.com does. The specific choices are different though (like drawing is much different).

• by malikNF on 4/16/22, 10:52 PM

  >This app is in Beta - we are adding new features and making improvements every day. If you have any suggestions for improvements, please let us know!

  How exactly though?

  Wish there was some kind of link on the message where you can submit feedback.

• by z33k on 4/17/22, 10:04 AM

  Nice, the "divide wall" tool feels oddly satisfying to make doorways with. The drag and drop seems to bug out for moving tokens on the latest Firefox stable.

  For a DnD tool that's on the complete other end of the spectrum (aiming for realistic visuals), we've been using https://wildshapevtt.com/ for our D&D 5e sessions for over a year now. It's been great and there's even pre-made maps for the Lost Mines of Phandelver campaign.

• by dsr_ on 4/17/22, 10:55 AM

  This is surprisingly usable in the current form. Nice!

  Features I would like to see:

  1. Select walls and move them

  2. Select a set of lines and change the scale

  3. A few different line types - adding double, wavy and thick would help a lot

  4. Change line color.

  5. A "gametime" mode where the drawn lines are temporarily immutable but tokens can be easily moved around. Flipping between the two modes should be a single click.

  6. Change background color of grid squares - this gets you forest and river and mountains, or bushes and streams and rocks.

• by cicadawings on 4/17/22, 4:10 AM

  It's cool, and I feel dickish being like "Someone made a cool thing? Those suckers, we already have cool things", but you could get a lot of the same functionality by building on top of other open-source minimalist diagramming tools, some of which I can see have been mentioned in other comments, and just adding on assets for D&D specific stuff. Like I'm not sure what I could do with this that I can't do with excalidraw.

  But in terms of more useful feedback

  - The way the canvas expands when a line is close to the edge is very clever. It might be useful if that could be done in real time somehow, so that if you're drawing a long line the canvas can keep up with you

  - Some more erase and selection options would be cool, if I have to delete a big structure that I made out of a bunch of tiny line segments I think the only way I can do that is individually clicking them.

  - Zoom seems kinda janky for me, that might just be my browser (Desktop Safari). Also if there's a way to pan I couldn't get it to work

• by geuis on 4/16/22, 10:41 PM

  Good idea but doesn't seem to work on iOS Safari. Tried all the tools, none draw.

• by batch12 on 4/17/22, 12:28 AM

  Thought it would be a machine learning text to image based on what is being described. Now my brain is stuck on what a speech to text to image model would generate when being driven by a dungeon master.

• by AQuantized on 4/17/22, 2:47 AM

  The ability to draw and connect straight lines is much more fluid than any system design or general drawing tool I've used, very smooth. It would be great to have a free drawing tool on top of this.

  The drag function is quite janky insofar as you need to drag then release on an object, then click again to place. It should probably be either click once or hold down lmb.

  Being able to import your own images if probably the most essential feature you could add.

• by imranq on 4/17/22, 8:15 AM

  I'd imagine someone could use text-to-image models like Dall-E to visualize a scenario with a few images

• by meristohm on 4/18/22, 5:34 PM

  On Firefox, adding shapes (the far right-hand side: circle, square, triangle, rectangle) puts the shape in the middle of the map and there it stays--I haven't figured out yet how to move the shapes around or place them somewhere else.

• by site-packages1 on 4/17/22, 2:34 AM

  Like draw.io with fewer features overall but some additional icons.

• by davidkuennen on 4/17/22, 8:01 AM

  Cool. We use https://roll20.net/ for that in our DnD group.

• by betterburnout on 4/17/22, 11:43 AM

  The simplicity is great. I'd just like an alternative to play a sci-fy adventure

• by Tepix on 4/17/22, 9:21 AM

  Looks great!

  Some criticism: Moving the position of a player icon on the map is non-intuitive.

• by gigamick on 4/14/22, 10:24 AM

  It's early days and looking for feedback :-)