I love that the town of Sinder is growing so much. One thing I had a thought about was how to keep the updates to the Sinder map (and possibly also the map of all of Wolfery) kept up to date in an easy to edit, hard to accidently overwrite way. My though would be to host it in some sort of version control system, like git. I don’t know which system works best with psd’s, and that’s something I can look into and research, but it would be great to have the ability to make pull requests to the map (or whatever language the vcs we choose uses) to keep the map as easy to update as possible. Thoughts? Especially other @moderators?
I’ve never used anything like that, but I’m down to learn a new skill as long as it doesn’t introduce any security concerns. :>
Also worth mentioning this is a public forum though, so depending on intentions of the conversation and information contained within, we may need to move it somewhere else.
I work pretty extensively with source control, and my understanding is that there is not really a good non-commercial solution for shared versioning of things like PSDs. Git is mediocre-at-best. I have heard that Adobe’s own (commercial) synchronization server is reasonable, but the cost is probably prohibitive.
The big issue is that Git cannot reconcile changes if two people edit the file at the same time - so, this gets you the ability to get back old versions, but it doesn’t prevent me from overwriting your changes if we both edited different areas. As far as I’m aware, this is common to most revision control, since PSD files aren’t designed to be worked with that way.
A simple “repository” would be a good idea.
@Riverrynn, while those fancy PSD merge features sounds nice, I think it might be overkill.
If we have a spot where we can download the map, edit it by adding our own layer group, and then upload it as a new version, I think that should be enough.
I would imagine a serial version control, with incremental v1, v2, v3 versions for each file.
If you download v2 and add something, and someone else already uploads v3, then you would manually need to reapply your own changes to v3 before uploading your own v4.
Maybe a GitHub repo could work for this sort of repository?
Or any other system that would work better with binary files?
Git works great as long as you can get LFS support. But honestly, given the need to do serial version control, something like Dropbox or Google Drive probably will do what’s needed.
Maybe. But I would want anyone to be able to download, but you need to make a “pull request” (upload request?) to upload a new version, so that the builders can be gatekeepers. If that is doable with Dropbox or so, then that would work as well!
But I haven’t used it, so I can’t tell.
Pull requests would require git for this. Version control for documents is doable via other means but not so much images.
If you’re looking for anyone to be able to propose an upload but only some users to be able to approve them, then that’s a reasonable workflow for git with LFS enabled. Mostly want to make sure we’re getting a useful feature out of git, since we’re not really getting the primary feature of revision management.
I’m tempted to suggest a textual way of describing and generating maps, but that could probably turn into a major project all its own. And with all the RPGs out there, this might’ve been done several times over already anyway.
The Virtual Landscape Design Language. 
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I am of the opinion that if you were to build this it would be really cool.
I am also of the opinion that we probably shouldn’t delay finding a solution for the current maps until something like this is ready. It might take a bit.
If we make sure that PRs are only ever compared against the latest version, a git repository on GitHub or similar could work. As much as it would be nice to just be able to add some layers and have a vcs reconcile differences, I do know from experience that most vcs’s don’t work well with binary files and merging.
Even if it’s just for hosting the most up-to-date version of the map(s) and serve as a place for making change requests, I feel like something git based would work for that. Until we can find a better (and preferably free) solution, it sound like the best option (or at least one that’s better than trying to find the most recent version of the map in the forum).
One other solution could be to rebuild the maps as SVGs, which are text files and not binary files, thus should be version controlled easier. I could mess around with SVGs to see if they merge the way I’d expect them to. So merges can’t be done manually it seems, but it is doable with Inkscape produced and edited SVGs with the expected results… so if we want to go that route, SVGs would be an option.
SVGs can merge, but it depends how you’re generating / manipulating them. As a general rule, if you are working with them in tools that natively support SVG at all times, they are likely to only be a small pain to merge. If you use any tool that converts them to an internal format, the newly-saved SVG from it will not merge especially cleanly with the prior version.
So yes Inkscape, no Illustrator.