New to Digital Cartography? Software General Information

[trevor]

Have to say, the zoom in MT really is massively impressive.

Thanks. It's not as slick as VD's zooming, but at least it's available

Here are a couple vids Dorpond made a long while back when we first removed the limits on the zoom. Note: they look choppy because of the screencast software, in practice it's much smoother:

http://rptools.net/dorpond/demos/Zooming/Zooming.html
http://rptools.net/dorpond/demos/Zoom2/Zoom2.html

It turns out that it's not really as practical as we originally thought it would be. That is, when you sit down to create an encounter, you typically aren't thinking at the continent level. It's nice to be able to zoom way out in order to get context, or switch between hotspots, but don't generally interact with tokens at that scale.

[dormouse]

Thanks. It's not as slick as VD's zooming, but at least it's available
...
they look choppy because of the screencast software, in practice it's much smoother:

That would make VD's zoom incredibly impressive. For me, the MT one was instantaneous (or at least it seemed able to go faster than I could turn the wheel - and my display managed it without problems) and entirely smooth.

It turns out that it's not really as practical as we originally thought it would be. That is, when you sit down to create an encounter, you typically aren't thinking at the continent level. It's nice to be able to zoom way out in order to get context, or switch between hotspots, but don't generally interact with tokens at that scale.

I had wondered about that
I can see that it would be very useful if drawing a very large map (ie one that is much bigger than the monitor when you are at the resolution level you want), but couldn't see what would be gained in play apart from switching between hotspots. And I prefer everyone in the same place. All the players are in one place (we play f2f) and just use the VTT for mapping etc, so they can all see what any of them sees unless there's a real effort to hide it.
I suppose what it would enable is a very large map which they can move around, rather than lots of smaller maps. So long as MT can handle the very large maps.
I also noticed that you'd taken away the maximum cell size limit that I seem to remember from before (50x50 I think it was), so the maps could be done at 200x200 with no need to rescale the standard sized DJ images.
I haven't had a chance to look at it in massive detail yet, but it seemed to me that the maps would still be done outside of MT primarily.