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Ask HN: How to develop GIS program for fantasy maps?

by Otternonsenz on 6/24/22, 9:42 PM with 6 comments

In working with data from real world GIS map programs as part of my day-to-day workflow, my daydreams go into the maps I’d actually like to be looking at, which are those from the home brew TTRPGs that I’m a part of.

If I wanted to make a simple program to help Dungeon Masters make and store map data to use in app or elsewhere, where do I start?

It just feels like any existing application is overkill (be that price or features for real world applications) for this use case; Plus my only experience developing is mostly front end work with HTML, JavaScript, and PHP to glue stuff together.

I’m willing to learn any language or do deeper research to figure it out myself, but unsure of where to begin. Thanks for any and all input!

by spaceywilly on 6/25/22, 2:58 AM
This may be helpful. What you’ll probably want to do is make an image of your map and place it somewhere on earth in a GIS program, then your image becomes a custom map layer and you can add additional data to it.
https://rossthorn.github.io/interactivefantasymaps.html
by rl3 on 6/25/22, 1:15 AM
You may be interested in this:
https://www.legendkeeper.com/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31612007
by matthewjames on 6/25/22, 12:39 AM
What kind of features would this hypothetical product need from your community to be useful? To have a small paid tier such as a small fee per map/month/year?
I have done a lot of geospatial app development.