August Entry: Multiple textured paths

[Mrugnak]

There are eight sets Cobbles, Dungeon, Hatching, Marsh, MtnPath, Snow, WoodPath, WoodStream. They are all zipped set of 18 tiles. All are JPG so there is some loss in them from the pure version but all are 2048 which is nearly 300dpi. They range from 13 to 26Mb except hatching which is 7Mb.

These are really great. I want to say thanks again for doing them.

Quick question on scaling, they're not exactly 300 dpi - so for purposes of scaling one inch to X pixels... what is the resolution you were working at? I'm getting 292.57142(lots of numbers) which is an awkward number.

[Redrobes]

These are really great. I want to say thanks again for doing them.

Quick question on scaling, they're not exactly 300 dpi - so for purposes of scaling one inch to X pixels... what is the resolution you were working at? I'm getting 292.57142(lots of numbers) which is an awkward number.

Thanks, yeah the dpi is a little awkward but you can normally set up your printer so that the print its exactly 7 inches. If thats a little difficult then set up a custom page size of 7 inches and print to fit page. Or I guess at extreme end, print a few off and scale it so that the grid is 1 inch by using a ruler which is the most accurate way of calibrating it. At the end of the day the current value is only 2.5% off of 300dpi so assuming the printer is perfect then 1 inch is going to be about 0.6mm or so out which is not a lot really. You ought to be able to ask the printer for 292dpi in any case and it should scale it right. The printer will scale the image no matter what you do to it because very few printers are natively exactly 300dpi so its all just numbers - 300 exactly is no better or worse than 292. As long as you have enough to show good res then you should be fine.

If you have any printer trouble then post and explain and we can sort it out.

[Gamerprinter]

These are really great. I want to say thanks again for doing them.

Quick question on scaling, they're not exactly 300 dpi - so for purposes of scaling one inch to X pixels... what is the resolution you were working at? I'm getting 292.57142(lots of numbers) which is an awkward number.

Take it from an expert - I run two companies in graphics and digital printing (two if you include Gamer Printshop.)

Most photographic quality printing can be achieved at 200 dpi. Only the most detailed maps with small text labels present a problem. The important issue for color is color gamut or the range of color. A 48 bit color image is a far higher quality photo, but still only requires 200 dpi to accurate print.

Small text requires high resolution, like 600 dpi.

I've printed huge Campaign Cartographer files with teeny, tiny text - they were the only blurry issue on the map. Everything else was perfect.

So photo images or terrain maps created at higher resolutions are generally unnecessary.

GP

[Mrugnak]

*shifty look*

I was considering them for a virtual table top, actually, which means that my printer's automatic scaling isn't any help under the circumstances.

MapTools draws a grid (Square or hexagonal) based on the pixel dimensions you give it - and it only accepts integers, not floating points. 292 will be close "enough" probably, they're small tiles - I'm always a bit leery of being off, however, because on a larger map, all those decimal places end up with your grid being off at the edges.

[torstan]

For maptool you really don't want to be using 300px squares as it will eat all your memory and choke. I'd suggest that you scale them to 50 px squares. The best way to do this is to decide how many squares you want to a side on these images, say 7 as that's the number if squares on the blank tile. Now that means you want 350px by 350px tiles. Go into Image->Scale Image in Gimp and resize the image to exactly those dimensions. Now set up a 50px grid in maptool and drop these in as stamps with snap to grid turned on. They should line up perfectly. If you want them to be more detailed go up to 100px per square and make them 700px by 700px. You don't need to worry about dpi, but you do need to resize them for maptool.

Hope that helps.

Good work by the way Redrobes. These are great! Definitely swiping them for my image library.

[Redrobes]

Ahh, Ok, well I am using them on my ViewingDale VTT too and they work out just fine too. The bit map sample was from that. I didn't know about the integer DPI bit on maptool - I thought there was a grid align mode thingy (not being super experienced with it).

In that case, best thing is just to resample them to 2100 pix in X&Y. You could use GIMP, ImageMagic, PS, PSP, IrfanView or whatever to do it. Almost any type of resample will do including pixel or nearest neighbor in this case.

If you start running out of RAM with them then you could go down to 1400 but I have tried that and it didn't look so good when you look at the images close up.

[torstan]

Yep, maptool sticks to integer grid sizes. It also works best on 50px or 100px grids so I really do suggest you go well below a 200dpg (dots per grid?) resolution. I have to say that I normally have a 20-30 grid wide view on my screen for maptool games so losing close in resolution isn't so much of a bind.

[Redrobes]

Crikey, these are 7x7 tiles so that would be 350 or 700 pixels across. That would be a bit of a shame as it would drop a lot of the detail. Perhaps it would be better to have a just a couple of tiles down and remove some and add others in sequence to keep the memory down.

[torstan]

Seriously, most maps look pretty good at that resolution within maptool.

However I'll admit that I tend to use maptool for single large maps, and it is this overall image size that gives those limits. It may well be possible to use 200px/grid tiles without a performance hit, but I haven't tried it yet. I'll have a shot with one of the recent stable builds and see what I find.

I say 50px per grid because that seems to be a pretty good base level of detail for gaming and allows for lots of squares on a 2000px square map - the largest single image size I'm happy to throw at maptool without it killing my players machines. I have a couple running 256Mb RAM machines so even 2000px maps are a stretch for them.

[Redrobes]

A 2K square image is 4 megapixels which is 12Mb with 24bit RGB and that uncompressed. So I can understand why having 16 of these might start giving an issue but an app ought to be able to have a 2K backdrop map no problem.

If you had a 4Kx3K image then that would be 36Mb. If that was 21x14 squares then thats about 200dpi with 3x2 tiles. It should be able to cope with that surely.

Anyway - here is a DPI image to show what you get for your megabyte... DPI shown on the top in blue.