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Review of Hex - World Creator
Hex has one big plus over the current reining king, Campaign Cartographer (CC): Hex is free. Of course, going back to the old adage, you do get what you pay for.
Hex's main advantage is that it is quite intuitive. At heart it is a hex mapping program. To begin, you specify the size of the hex grid and then proceed to fill it. You are given numerous terrain types that you can put in each hex. This process is very easy and you can rapidly put together a small island. This compares very favorably with the couple hour learning curve that CC requires.
The real question about a mapping program is how well is creates maps. I will attempt to look at this from two different angles. First, how powerful it is in allowing you to customize your map and, secondly, how the finished maps look.
Power and Usability
First, by limiting itself to hexes, Hex imposes severe restrictions on your maps. Gone are the irregularly shaped coastlines or lakes, now they must conform to the hex grid. Similarly, roads and rivers are stuck going from one hex to the next, in straight lines. You can't adjust the size of the lines used to draw the roads or rivers either, so there is no way to differentiate great rivers from minor tributaries. There are 47 different terrain types, including hills, forests, and settlements of various sizes. Hex includes a provision to create your own terrain by importing bitmaps. I hope to see expanded terrain types in the near future, as this would greatly increase Hex's power.
As mentioned above, drawing a map is very easy. You have three choices for laying down the terrain: a "pen" that lays down hexes one at a time, a spray-gun, and a fill-in tool. I would have liked more tools, for example, something that allows you to box off areas of the grid to then fill in. It is somewhat tedious to use the pen to outline a region of the map that you want to be a great forest before you can fill it in. The one tool that is glaringly missing is a Text tool. You can only label settlements. You can not add any text anywhere else on the map. They claim that this feature will be added in an upcoming release and I sincerely hope so, for it is perhaps the largest oversight in the entire package.
In a rather interesting twist, Hex allows you to create races and countries. You describe the races by a name and with numerical scores for their Attributes (Intellect, Warfare, and Moral). You can further specify the race's alignment, its religious beliefs, and its level of social harmony (warlike or peaceful). There is also room to add in any additional comments on the race. What use is this, you may ask? Whenever you create a settlement, you can assign it a number of statistics, ranging from which race(s) occupy it, to its size, to its governmental type. In the current release, all this information is essentially wasted, as the only way to access it is by right-clicking on the city. The information on countries is even more useless, as I couldn't find any way to associate terrain with a given country.
Graphics Quality
On first glance, the maps look rather ordinary. Although the hexes are small bitmaps, they look very dull, especially when outlined with a thick black hex map. I then found a little switch in the Options panel that allowed me to turn off the hex map. Suddenly the map looked very good! The bitmaps looked far better and flowed together very well. The overall look was one of a drawn map, rather than just a bunch of unconnected hexes. Of course, after a second you can certainly see that all the terrain is still in hex shapes, and that the roads and rivers go in short, straight bursts, but these are minor details. The major flaw in the presentation of the program is in printing. There is no easy way to get your map to print on one page. There is no way to specify landscape printing, and there are only five "scalings" for you map. This means that unless you have a long, skinny map, your printout will be a tiny square on the upper third of the page. Luckily there is a print-preview function so you can adjust the scalings to see which one will fit your map on a page.
One thing to remember is that this is the beta version of Hex so you are not getting a completely stable program. Version 0.9 reduced my system from 75% free system resources to 8% free on many occasions. Version 0.93 has just been released and is far more stable. Finally, there is no help file included in the program, so you are on your own.
Overall
The overall feeling that I get from this program is of potential. Right now it is very unfinished. The lack of a text tool or a help file and the inability to assign countries are the most apparent reminders of what needs to be added. The Readme for the program does state that these will be fixed, and that the ability to assign more attributes to any hex, not just settlements, will be added. It looks like they are hoping to turn Hex into an interactive map, something that you keep on your laptop and refer to during play. Of course, for this to truly be useful, they should include a distance calculator, so you can find out how long it will take to get from place to place. There are already movement modifiers listed for all the terrain, so Hex could even tell you how long it would take. Of course, this is a lot of work, but would certainly make Hex a worthy supplement to Campaign Cartographer.
So, who would want Hex? I would say anyone! It's free, so feel free to download the current version and spend half an hour playing with it. If you've never tried a computer mapping program, see how you like it. The current version is no competition for Campaign Cartographer and I doubt it ever will be. If you want to create a very detailed map, CC is the way to go. For a quick and dirty job, the current version of Hex will suffice quite nicely.
Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)
