This is a map of a somewhat medieval style city for my play by post Dungeons and Dragons game. I've been learning Inkscape with it, and this is the product of about 4 to 6 hours of actual work.

One thing I'd like to get working is the ability to color each building differently. They are all clones of a set of 9 different base buildings. I'm going to look into using the "unset" fill mode on the originals today.

Looks good, one thing it could do with is something to make it looke like there are worn paths in the town. not sure how you'd do it easily tho...
Bit of variation on the buildings like you say will help too.

Maybe you could duplicate all the buildings, paste that on a semi-transparent layer above, and then use the random color generator I've heard about but never ever tried using to make random shades of brown and whatnot to make varied rooftops.

You could probably make a layer below the buildings and use the fill tool to fill in all the spaces between the buildings (set it to shrink a bit). (You'd have to remove the grass.) Then add a bunch of extra nodes and use the "jitter nodes" operation to make it look less perfect.

I discovered one of the things that was causing me problems using clones. I was making clones of clones, rather than just duplicating the clones. End result, once I set a fill on the first clone, all of the clones based on it afterward no longer accepted a new fill color. I have gone back and replaced a few of the clones of clones with duplicates instead, and I can control the colors much easier now.

Also I applied a very slight blur on the roads, and they look a touch better now.

Did you try "unlink clone"? Selecting the clones you want to recolor and then doing edit->clone->unlink clone should allow you to recolor at will.

llogg wrote:Did you try "unlink clone"? Selecting the clones you want to recolor and then doing edit->clone->unlink clone should allow you to recolor at will.

Unfortunately, doing that resets the fill an all of the objects I used to make the buildings (about 10 to 15, depending on which building it is). But, copying a clone is a much better result, and worked extremely well for my fixes.

i like the houses but where is the streets ?

Very nice houses, but i second the call for streets - right now, every way is a back alley. Some houses should be very tight, leaving only room to scrape in between, while there should be some paths that could accommodate a cart (- you did that in the upper middle).

The offers a possibility to randomize colors (rightmost symbol) of entire objects, so if the houses are separate objects, that works nicely.

Also, some fencing around the city would be cool, to keep the wolves out..