The homepage of this project has moved to http://mapcraft.glendale.org.uk/.
Mapcraft is a tile based map editor for pen and paper roleplaying games. It is designed to handle everything from complete world maps (including spherical worlds, like the image shown here) down to local village maps, automatically keeping track of where smaller maps are located within their larger scale parents.
Maps can be rescaled, merged (so maps of neighbouring areas can overlap, whilst remaining consistent) and cropped. More importantly, metadata can be stored on any object within the map. For example, you could store population data about towns and villages, keep track of who rules them and what their feudal obligations are. Then it would be possible to automatically generate population and fief statistics on a country for inclusion in another document.
Maps are stored as XML data, so can be accessed programmatically via standard XML APIs. There are already plugins for Xalan which allow a JPEG image to be created from a map automatically and inserted into a Document.
This is different from the normal aim of just trying to create maps which look pretty. The idea is to have pretty maps as well, though this is secondary. Consistency and good support for meta data is held to be more important.
Supported Platforms
Mapcraft is written in Java 1.4, and requires JRE 1.4 in order to run. It has been developed on Linux, but has also been tested on MS Windows. It should run on any operating system that supports Java, and which has a graphical display (due to the way some things have been implemented, some of the backend functions also require a graphical environment, though this is on the list of things to fix).