Yet more mapping tools. It came to my attention that Campaign Cartographer (CC) was on time-limited offer together with its adds-on City Cartographer, Dungeon Cartographer and a host of other extras for £22.83 from Humble Bundle. This seemed too good an opportunity to pass on despite only just recently having purchased Dungeon Painter Studio, so I took the plunge and acquired this suite.
So here are some immediate first impressions of CC. As with DPS, definitely not a review.
First of all, the UI of CC is much less intuitive than DPS offering if what you want is a quick dungeon layout or building interior. This was my comparative test. DPS I was able to immediately get to work with on a small project to create a building floorplan. When I tried to do the same with CC I was flailing around getting nowhere; all the "obvious" elements I expected to be presented in the UI just weren't there. I should emphasise that with both products I was trying to see what I could accomplish with minimal reference to any help instructions or googling "how to".
I did find it much easier however to start making a geographic map in CC, though still quite tricky.
I started working through CC's Quick Start guide, and things began to make more sense.
The CC bundle is about twice the price of DPS, but comes packed with a lot more features and assets than DPS. I can see that CC is a more powerful and mature product but is built around a different design paradigm. DPS is more like a raster graphics program like Photoshop or Corel Photopaint, or GIMP. CC is more like a vector-graphics, CAD program. I have more experience with the raster graphics paradigm than vector graphics which is probably why I found DPS so much easier to get started with. I will persevere with CC and work through its tutorials. I can see that these two different tools will have differing strengths and applications.
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