Hexcrawls are an extremely popular way of gamefying a fictional world in RPGs, serving as a format to base adventures and campaigns off. FMG is a dream-come-true for players wanting to easily create hexcrawls for one-shot sessions or years-long games.
I don't believe FMG is made exclusively for roleplaying (although there is a lot of overlap with tools that mostly cater to that audience, the dungeons being a prime example). However, while this idea is being pitched as an overt hex-crawl assistant, its usefulness should be obvious for many other audiences as well (world-builders, hobby writers)...
Problem: there is a lot of information shown on different layers and tools, from religion and biomes to work-in-progress economy and history. This is good for a wide-view of the world but hardly ideal for getting an idea of what a specific part of the map is like in its full details (including for a given town or hex, as examples). Navigating through all the layers is error-prone, cumbersome and requires external note-keeping to get all details of a given smaller area right.
Solution: a summary dialog. If you were to click on a hex, for example, you would see a basic condensation of all the layer data: biome, religion, state/province it's a part of, points of interest inside the hex (town, dungeons, etc), military... While the basic idea focuses on hexes, there is no reason why this dialog can't have a dynamic scope so users could adjust the dialog to show information based on something as small as a settlement or as large as a state... the logic for showing a summary for a hex would most likely be applicable to any other map scope.
Alternatives: instead of (or in addition to), a "booklet" format could be presented with the same information. It would be a dialog or window showing the summaries for every hex, region, state, settlement, etc... in the map, so it could be used as a source-book reference for the entire world. While the dialog would be presented in a tabular format, this would be textual instead (T is a town of population N, located in the P province, on a B biome. Its most common religion is R...). If this mode works like a stand-alone description of the world, an index at the beginning would probably be helpful to allow users to find and navigate all the relevant information.
EDIT: Big thanks to everyone involved in the making of this amazing tool!
Hexcrawls are an extremely popular way of gamefying a fictional world in RPGs, serving as a format to base adventures and campaigns off. FMG is a dream-come-true for players wanting to easily create hexcrawls for one-shot sessions or years-long games.
I don't believe FMG is made exclusively for roleplaying (although there is a lot of overlap with tools that mostly cater to that audience, the dungeons being a prime example). However, while this idea is being pitched as an overt hex-crawl assistant, its usefulness should be obvious for many other audiences as well (world-builders, hobby writers)...
Problem: there is a lot of information shown on different layers and tools, from religion and biomes to work-in-progress economy and history. This is good for a wide-view of the world but hardly ideal for getting an idea of what a specific part of the map is like in its full details (including for a given town or hex, as examples). Navigating through all the layers is error-prone, cumbersome and requires external note-keeping to get all details of a given smaller area right.
Solution: a summary dialog. If you were to click on a hex, for example, you would see a basic condensation of all the layer data: biome, religion, state/province it's a part of, points of interest inside the hex (town, dungeons, etc), military... While the basic idea focuses on hexes, there is no reason why this dialog can't have a dynamic scope so users could adjust the dialog to show information based on something as small as a settlement or as large as a state... the logic for showing a summary for a hex would most likely be applicable to any other map scope.
Alternatives: instead of (or in addition to), a "booklet" format could be presented with the same information. It would be a dialog or window showing the summaries for every hex, region, state, settlement, etc... in the map, so it could be used as a source-book reference for the entire world. While the dialog would be presented in a tabular format, this would be textual instead (T is a town of population N, located in the P province, on a B biome. Its most common religion is R...). If this mode works like a stand-alone description of the world, an index at the beginning would probably be helpful to allow users to find and navigate all the relevant information.
EDIT: Big thanks to everyone involved in the making of this amazing tool!