A vector drawing program, CorelDraw
A vector tracing program, CorelTrace
A bitmap program, CorelPaint
3-D rendering program, Anim8or, freeware
Interstellar space mapping program, Celestia, freeware

I've used Adobe products for vector drawing too. I prefer Corel. Adobe Illustrator has vector tracing and drawing capabilities.

In Anim8or, I render scaled physical features, mountain ranges, buildings, landscapes, seascapes, cityscapes, rivers, oceans, in depth, height, and length. Anim8or is also an animation program. Flyby, flythrough, flyover, flyunder views of scenes, moving figures, moving vehicles, are nifty. The program has a steep learning curve and heavily uses RAM resources. I run it on 2 Gigs.

Celestia supports scripting and object importing. Create a 3-D model in Anim8or, import the object into Celestia, write a file for where, when, and how it renders, write a script for a flyby of the object and see the object in orbit around a distant star's Jovian planet. Celestia has a steep learning curve and consumes RAM resources too.

I'm sure there are programs that do mapmaking with more robust user-friendly features than vector programs, but I like the flexibility of being able to control every aspect of the input and output.

All of them output to print, directly, or indirectly as JPEGs. Anim8or, Celestia, and CorelPaint output to AVI formats also, no sound though. For dubbing in sound on video, I go to other programs.

Also check out this: http://www.rpgweb.com/index.html

Here's some info at Liberty Hall's wiki:

http://wiki.libertyhallwriters.org/doku.php?id=howto:worldbuilding#software

[This message has been edited by mikemunsil (edited May 11, 2009).]