• What means the name "AutoREALM"? How did you choose it?

Liken it to AutoCAD™, but "Automatically create a REALM".

• When you started the AutoREALM project, what state of mind were you?

It was in 1999, my friend John Hicks and I were skiing. We both play D&D™. We'd both tried the CC2™ demo, and were pretty disappointed at how difficult it seemed to use. We had a lot of time to kill on the chairlifts, and he said: "Why don't you try doing your own map maker?". It sounded like a good idea, and I'm always up for a new programming project, so we spent the rest of that day (and several of the next) talking about what it should do, how easy it should be to use, etc. , etc.

Although I mostly did it for fun for my friend and myself, after I finished writing AutoREALM, I figured I could make a buck or two. So I started advertising it in Dungeons and Dragons™ magazines. Not a stellar success, I must say. I could have probably kept it up, but the advertising was pretty expensive, I didn't have any distribution system set up, and I didn't want to spend any more money trying to get it off the ground with little chance of a return. After giving up on it for a while, I finally decided that I'd rather give it away as Open Source than let it just molder on my hard drive. I'm very pleased that so many people have found it useful. It validates my belief that AutoREALM fills a need for a cheap but good RPG map maker.

• Why people should "trust in" or use AutoREALM?

They should try it out for a while, and if it fits their needs, they should use it. If they don't care for how AutoREALM does things, buy a competitor product. It's pretty simple. I don't pretend that AutoREALM meets everyone's needs, but the best thing about it is that it's free. If you are looking for something to map with, AutoREALM is easy enough to try, but if you need something better, then it is very easy to move on.

• What are its strengths and weaknesses?

Its biggest strength is that it is easy to use. It doesn't have every feature imaginable, but it has enough features that it can do a pretty good job.

Its biggest weakness is probably that it has evolved rather than having had a clean design from the beginning. There are a number of quirky little things about it that I'd like to change now, but are rather hard after you have an established base of users.

• What's in development and the future you see for it?

I maintain a wish list of items that people e-mail me on my web site. *1 I'm just picking items off that list as I find time. The next biggest feature will be icon filled areas. That's definitely the biggest requested feature now, but there's lots of others that will find their way into AutoREALM, eventually!

I don't know if I'll continue to work on AutoREALM indefinitely. Although others have contributed little bits and pieces of code, I'm still the main designer and programmer. *2 Perhaps if I get tired of it and move on, someone else will pick up the mantle. Right now, though, I'm still having fun doing it. It is rewarding to see an online community springing up around my little tool. There have been a lot of other people contributing maps, symbols, and RUL files (for automatic name generation) to the AutoREALM community.

Obviously , I'm not Bill Gates, since I'm certainly not going to retire off AutoREALM! But it is pretty neat to see something that you created spawn creative efforts in a bunch of other people, and to be able to see what other people are doing with your software. I'll probably keep tinkering with it as long as I keep getting positive feedback!

Andy Gryc Author of AutoREALM http://gryc.ws

March 4, 2002.

 

Notes:

*1: The Wish List is now on SourceForge. Thanks to go over there *2: Not anymore, since the project moved on the SourceForge website.