I ended up using this in a panic.
My game session was starting soon,
I desperately needed a map for the
upcoming coastal sea voyage, and
I suck at art. Plus, I had a review
copy sitting on the stack of 'things to
ship out'.
So, I pop in the disk, and... wow! In
about 45 minutes, I had a full 3-D map
of the entire region, using only my pathetic
sketch done on college ruled paper during a
fairly dull science seminar.
In short, it rocked.
Among the high points: great interface. Now, I never read a manual before starting a program-- good programs don't need them. Fractal Mapper was this kind of program, and I was able to instantly get in and get to work. Remember, I was in a deadline crunch.
Nice set of icons. Good fractal tools for doing landmasses, rivers, paths, etc. Well designed menus that let you easily access the full feature set. Call this the software designer in me, but I wish I had designed this program. It's very well put together, being both user-friendly yet powerful.
It outputs to several image formats as well as postscript. Final color (or B&W) printed results are publishing quality, so this would be useful for game publishers or freelancers who need a design tool.
Later exporation revealed a lot of neat features. Layers, 3D terrain, extra tools, oh, so much to play with! You want a full feature list, read their nbos.com site.
Fractal Mapper is now up to version 5.0, and includes the Fractal World Explorer. This lets you add weather and seasons, day and night cycles, all sorts of neat goodies.
And, you can export your map into VRML. What's this mean? It means you can use a VRML-enabled web browser or plug-in to move around your map in 3-D. And you can give the map to your players so they can do the same. (You can also give them just a subset, i.e. a version without all your GM secrets!)
Downsides: The printing took some tweaking. Direct printing to my Canon color printer was hosed (icons came out pixelated), but print-as-postscript file then sending _that_ to the printer worked.
Also, it requires Windows. I tried it under Linux using VMWare (needed registered version). Under "wine" for Linux, it worked except for the color icon images. As a linux user I'm going to try tweaking things to eventually get it working windows-free, but that's just a quirk of mine.
Comparing it with other programs: well, first, off, it blows away just using a paint or layout program. Similarly, a general CAD tool isn't as useful. "Campaign Cartographer" is its main competitor; I review that elsewhere on this site but in short, "Fractal Mapper" is superior in terms of ease of use and easily matches CC for feature sets-- and FM is also substantially cheaper and comes with more 'out of the box' (CC requires buying the add-ons like the world explorer.)
Another tool, "MapMagical" from Irony Games is available online for free. This is nice for some simple things, but even free isn't comparable. Overall, I'd say pay to get "Fractal Mapper".
In terms of availability, I could not find fractal mapper on CNet
or Amazon.com. Fortunately, NBOS list it as
being at HyperBooks
and RPGShop.com. They also offer the original version 1.0 on their nbos.com site for free.
And it must be said-- this program was fun. Making maps shouldn't be work, it should be an enjoyable creative endeavor. Fractal Mapper really shines with this. By being intuitive and visual, it removed any wall between 'concept' and 'creation'. I find it's fun just to power it up and draw, then come up with game ideas from that. "Hey, that's a cool island... I bet it has pirates!"
It took almost no time to learn then create my first map, and now I'm using it forever. I got it for free, but I'm going to pay to upgrade it (and getting me to fork over money for Windows software is nearly impossible!)
Go to forum!
(Due to spamming, old forum discussions are no linked.)