If you have a heap of tokens for Roll 20 or bought some map packs it should be nice and quick to deal with, otherwise you are going to need to either donate some cash to brilliant token makers like Devin Night and import some maps. I had a little play with the drawing tools and they are not going to provide you with a sophisticated map in the long run. They have one complete map, some textures, some basic tokens and the drawing tools. You are going to have to go looking for them and copy them into your resource folder. There are not a great deal of resources for you to use straight up either. Some views in the tool are just too cluttered and this needs to be adressed to make the tool that much better I would have loved to have seen some clever use of space but it really does suffer from overcrowding a lot. Many of the default views just overwhelm the interface and while you can size stuff as you go, this is a big ask. But without changing the interface overly much there are serious issues with screen real estate. Let me tell you that the stuff above may seem like techno babble to you but it means that they have done a lot of work on improvements and added a lot. There is one problem that I encountered here though. Sam tells me that the vision system has been enhanced, making it much quicker than other versions of MapTool. This version also has the dynamic lighting of other versions of MapTool and that means it is worth looking at. Mote is a free offering and in Sam’s words, will always be free. They have added the ability for IRC and SQL management as well as the ability to code and edit scripts inside the tool itself rather than having to take it to an external editor. The user interface is very similar to the UI of MapTool but the running of it is much smoother and it performs better in most circumstances. Much of the problems that users of MapTool have Mote developers have targeted for a fix. I did get a mac to test it on but one of my students placed a password on it and I have no idea what it is so I have to wait until I see him again! Being that OSX runs on a Unix background system I am certain that it will run fine and most people develop in Windows so I did not test it there either. I am going to assume it works the same way on Mac. Mote works seamlessly on my desktop and even requires very little Linux Foo to set up and get running. So I decided to do my review in Linux as it is my system and choice. It has a release for Linux, Windows and Mac on the download site. One of the reasons I agreed to review this so soon is that Mote is truly cross platform. The focus of the Mote team has really been to clear out the folders of this type of code and replace it with current, state of the art code to ensure the system runs as well as it can and be truly cross platform. Some of it is almost certainly legacy code and therefore likely to be one of the things that can cause “quirks” like myself never being able to load it in the past. MapTool has been a Java development project for a long time and with such projects it has picked up a wealth of code. Mote at first appearance is very MapTool in appearance and has not deviated a great deal from the form. perhaps it is my focus on this in my own games and my own experience in the software industry. I don’t know what it is about RPG Knights but we certainly see a lot of this request come through. He was very forthcoming with a good deal of information about the tool and also patient to receive the review as I did not want to put it too close to the last Virtual Tabletop review. I was contacted by Sam of Idle Ideas keen to show off the MapTool fork that their developers have been working on for the past couple of years called Mote.
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