Copyright, licenses and mapmaking...

Been finishing off some top-down map assets for Wonderdraft tonight - which led to some thinking about how I want to license assets like that - obviously it's good to get them out so folks can use them, but equally it'd be nice to see some small reward for the time that I put in.

A bit of thought and discussion later - stuff like that (map assets, 3D files, etc - not scenarios or the like) I'n going to put out as CC-BY-NC, which means it's under a Creative Commons (CC) license, so you can use it for your own projects; if you publish the result for others to use, you should credit me (BY); and this is restricted to Non-Commercial (NC) use.

Commercial use? Ask me. To quote what I've said on the linked page, while I am (obviously) interesting in making some small return on my effort, I’m equally interested in supporting independent creators and getting my work out there. Depending on who you are and what your project is, commercial licenses for things I create may range anywhere from ‘just give me a credit’ upwards.

More yak-shaving....

From Wiktionary:

yak shaving (uncountable)

1. Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.

   I was doing a bit of yak shaving this morning, and it looks like it might have paid off

Today's yak shaving involved upgrading my big iMac to macOS Catalina, as it can be done in the background, and allows me to make sure various essential bits of software don't break before I update my work laptop.

Of course, they do. Specifically, the time I was due to spend on podcast editing today went on getting a 64-bit Catalina-compatible version of Audacity working. :D

On the good side, I did also satisfy myself Wonderdraft still worked, and created a couple of assets for drawing top-down battlefield etc maps, specifically some Ordnance Survey style slope hatching.

More admin and a review

Today's the advert deadline for at least one of the magazines we advertise the show in, so time to dig out the previous year's advert and make the necessary adjustments. (And double check we have the right logo and name for our sponsor - I think it's stopped changing now :D)

Also, over on the Sage DM, there's an extended review of Wonderdraft for those of you looking for a program for drawing maps. The review is more focussed on RPG world-building/cartography, but it's still a handy tool (see recent post) if you're drawing battle /scenario maps, as there are a load of top-down building etc symbols you can use, and optional grids including square and hex.