Jeremy here

[Jcraulerson]

Hi all

My name is Jeremy. I wanted to introduce myself and explain why I joined. Firstly though let me say I see some great artwork and imaginations at play here and it's great. Now a little about me. I am a avid tabletop gamer with experience ranging from d and d to pathfinder to through the breach to vampire the masquerade. One thing that I have yet to find though was a interactive map that could help people understand on the fly what a town , city or population is like. Being someone in the IT world I decided to make this myself. I decided to start with something I'm currently running a game with. I choose pathfinders golarion , specifically the inner sea. The reason I have joined this group is because my aim is to make a map once you click on a region it shows a zoomed in map of that region and once you click on a city it shows. A zoomed in version of that city and so on and so forth. With information , npcs, modules , adventure paths and the like on the right hand side. Now for a single individual this is a huge undertaking and this I was hoping to find some like minded enthusiast to assist in the gathering of maps and data. Currently I have a map of each region and the city map of absalom. If any one wishes to help at all please feel free to contact me. Once the project is done it will be a free to use webpage for anyone wanting to use it.


Thank you
Jeremy

[niekell]

Hello Jeremy,
Colour me interested. Not so much in Golarion, but I figure if it can be done for one setting then why not another. This doesn't so much sound like an experiment in mapping as in programming though. If you don't intend to do gradual zooming (in/out) but rather "jump" between maps of different scale (i.e. world, continent, nation, region, town, building) then other than getting a hold of the various maps/schematics the rest should just be coding.
I'm a software developer myself (web applications mostly), and have brushed up against this very goal a couple of times but in the end the effort was too daunting to tackle alone. I'd be happy to chat more about it though.
Best wishes, niekell.

[ChickPea]

Hi Jeremy, welcome to the Guild.

We started something similar with our Guildworld project, though we haven't really developed it much beyond regional level. I was about to point you to a link of our zoomable Guildworld map, but it doesn't seem to be working for me right now. Hmmm... I'll chase that up with our admin, Redrobes.

Oh well, in the meantime, feel free to browse the GuildWorld folder and, err, watch this space!

[Jcraulerson]

Hi Niekell,


I agree there is a large degree of programming in this project. The cartography portion will come into play when we come to an area that has not been detailed enough to put into a module/Magazine/Adventure. At that point I will do my best to create it from description but with a project this large I feel I may dissatisfied with how my maps look in comparison to a true map making master! You bring up a good point though. For the coding I am using simple HTML5. I have some areas that will need assistance most certainly. Being I have just joined the Guild though I wanted to jump in to the user community and get a feel for everything before I start to ask where to post projects and ask for assistance. One of the biggest task with be data gathering. There are alot of dragon magazines , modules, and adventure paths that I want to include in this project. The goal here would be a basic world for people to play with. I know this is the aim of Pathfinder with pathfinder society but I want one that anyone can use and with out a ton of experience run a game and have it aw inspiring. Please let me know if this sounds like something you would be willing to put some time into once it gets started. If you want I can send you what i have now .... LOL for someone that has never touched HTML5 a day in his life I am happy with the 4 hours I have put into it so far.... (Mostly map gathering lol) .

Thank you
Jeremy

[Jcraulerson]

Hi ChickPea ,


Thanks for the information and the link (once you get is resolved). One thing I am finding is that my maps lack quality, so if anyone can take my maps and redraw them larger so when they are place on a webpage they dont look like poop that would be awesome or some advice on how to proceed with that would be awesome as well. I am all about getting the information to do things !!!! Thanks again for the link. Quick question though.... do these replies count toward my 5 post ?


thank you
Jeremy

[ChickPea]

Hi Jeremy, firstly, all comments count towards your post total. I can see that right now you've made four posts (check underneath your name to the left hand side of your comments. It gives your post count there.) When you've made five comments, you can use the site's PM system, so only one more comment needed.

Redrobes has waved his magic wand and the zoomable map works now. He's a genius!

As for quality with scaling, the only real way round that is to use vector graphics. I see you were commenting about HMTL5 above. You could perhaps look into Inkscape and the SVG format. SVG works - somewhat - within browsers (browser support can be patchy and may vary between different browsers). I use Inkscape for vector work a lot, but not so much for its SVG properties, so I'm not super knowledgeable on what you can and can't do. May be something worth looking into, though. Don't know if vector graphics are the style you're aiming for. You can't get all those lovely textures with vectors!

[niekell]

Hello Jeremy,
I'd be inclined to use a database behind the scenes to manage things like zoom level, location, names (searchable), and linkages between maps. I suppose you could use an XML data file or something more lightweight depending upon the size and detail of the world involved.

As ChickPea mentioned, you'd need vector graphics to keep detail if it were all one mega-map. I think the "one map to rule them all" option is the more difficult one though. I checked out the Guildworld map and it is pretty slick for what it does (zoom & pan). Kudos to the Guildworlders who set that up.

Considering that you will be obtaining maps "as they come", keeping everything in one massive vector map will be pretty inconvenient if not unworkable. If you just have placeholders for content until it becomes available then you are not forced to deal with everything at once. You can put scratch maps, rough sketches, in place of final polished maps until such time as the final versions become available.

I'll pass on participating in the data gathering. I'd be of little use anyway since I don't have anything to do with Golarion (I like PathFinder as a system but have no need for yet another world). I do wonder whether Paizo will allow such a compilation to be made available online even if it were community supported and free to use. They do own the IP rights to Golarion.

I am interested in helping with the programming side of things. Especially how it might be made more generic to cater for a wider gamut of worlds and campaign settings.
This could be basically an image driven drill-down web app. I think the difficult part will be setting up the imagemaps to drill down to lower levels. HTML can do that with imagemaps but setting them up can be tedious and if you're going to allow users to customise things then it can be complicated, but not impossible (http://iakob.com/canvas-area-draw/demo.html).
You'd probably need some "admin tools", where you could upload a map, define the imagemap zones, then put in links to other maps (at different zoom levels).
Best wishes, niekell.

[niekell]

Hello Jeremy,
I threw together a sample of what I think the 'program' should do in regards to zoom levels (not other aspects). It is located at my personal webspace for a limited amount of time (i.e. if someone is reading this post in the future I do not guarantee that the sample is still there).
I included a basic table of contents as navigation since the Admin pages don't really have a navigation path at the moment. Ideally each User page would just have an "Edit" button on it for Admins and then switch to the other view at that time.
Anyway, check it out and let me know if it is something like what you have been envisioning.
Best wishes, niekell.

[Redrobes]

Hi Jeremy, I wrote an app which did that and it was called ViewingDale. It was released about 10 years ago but was only midly successful. You can see it running on a youtube video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qELcbKXdRm8

The title refers to CWBP which is this websites Community World Building Project. If you go to the community mapping projects area then you will find that world and all of the threads relating to it. My sig used to have a CWBP1 area listing which linked to the pages - not sure the links work any more. There is also a CWBP2 project which has only limited mapping done on it but is still technically currently in progres. Then for the guilds 10th anniversary we had the GuildWorld where lots of us mapped bits of a new world that is also under the community pages.

I have put all of the GuildWorld into a LeafletJS map and you can have a play with that. The link is a sticky on the guildworld but ill link it here. There is also a set of zoomable maps for CWBP1 which there is no public sticky link but it does exist and this is the link - I just need to get off my butt and make up a page with "all" (all being 2 at the mo) links to the zoomable maps.

Now with my app ViewingDale it has hot spots that you can place down on the map and it can take you to a) other maps so you can jump into a building and carry on zooming or b) links to documents, sounds, movies and other stuff like a document of the character stats or monster stats etc. See the YT vid where it jumps to the picture of the top down icon. On the community zoom maps they are HTML web pages and we have included jumps to other maps and it can link to pictures and other stuff too. Its a little more clumsy but it can do it. So on guild world if you zoom down to Robbies map which is bottom right of the main continent then there is a link for the town The Guild which links to the this guild web page. But the better set of links is for CWBP1 where you can go to Ansium in the world and click on it and then my Redrobes map which is the green looking square mid left within Ansium and it will link down a few more steps down to Fentor Cross etc.

My app was a boxed disk but is not for sale any more and in fact the webpage is not there now tho I hope to reinstate the web pages somewhere soon. I am even considering selling the app as a digitial download only from this guild now that were getting the Buy/Sell sorted out. I am also considering porting it for linux for the Raspberry PI so that for $40 / £30 you can have the computer to run it. My app was a VTT - thats a virtual table top where several people can log into it and play online and move the characters about in the world. There are several VTT's out there. Notably, MapTool is a free one and also comes with zoom. It has many features extra to my app but its zoom capability was not as good. But its certainly worth checking out.

Finally, I have and will always disagree with this raster / vector argument about it being required for zooming. Not only have I wrote an app that shows that the argument is duff but in vector its not all that different since when you zoom you run out of vector points just as easily as you run out of pixels in raster images. You can zoom with raster or vector. You just need lots of pixels or lots of vector points. Since most people map raster then I think it would be hard to have a vector only zoom mapping system that took in a large assortment of other peoples work.

Right - links to zoomy maps:

Community pages:
https://www.cartographersguild.com/f...splay.php?f=61

Guildworld:
https://www.cartographersguild.com/l...ype=GuildWorld

CWBP1 zoom map:
https://www.cartographersguild.com/l...php?type=cwbp1


Edit: I have become a bit distracted. Whilst I had youtube open I thought id see if I could find the original inspiration for my app. I have searched for this before and never found it but it seems that somebody has uploaded it. When I was a wee nipper there was a program on the BBC and somebody has put most of the series up on youtube. Forgive the 1980's fashion but this is "Making the most of the micro". So after some extended scanning through the episode list I have found the bit I remember...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u2zEhqrTs8

Check out about 12mins 50s or so and he zooms into the world and down until he gets to a house. I was playing D&D a lot at this time and wanted a mapping system just like that. I saw that and immediately set to work. My first app was a vector one on the Acorn Electron just like that and it was about that speed too. So that was 1983 - 33years ago. I thought that footage was lost ! Hmmm showing my age now...