August Entry: Multiple textured paths

[Lord]

24bit color depth is really unnecessary. 8bit is perfectly fine for almost any use. It will reduce your file size and ram requirements considerably. Unless you have a huge gamut of color with some hi-res shading and gradients, 8 bit is your friend.

[Gamerprinter]

Redrobes, my tiles are 100 ppi

From all my visits to RPTools and discussions with RPMiller, I"ve come to the conclusion that many will be requiring only 50 ppi, but some people (RPMiller) wants 200 ppi, as MapTools allow you to zoom in and only 200 ppi really shows closeup detail well.

However, a general consideration is how long it takes to load a new map. I've created some early VT maps at 200 ppi, PNG and they were 10 - 12 MB. I was told that the expected file size should only be 1 MB for easiest downloading for most VT users. This just isn't possible for 200 ppi.

Since some users desire a higher res file, but don't want to pay the download hit, I've compromised to 100 ppi. My Dungeon Tiles are around 1.6 MB that's close enough to 1 MB for my taste.

GP

[Redrobes]

Lord, I think in general terms I disagree but in this case the tiles have a lot of random detail so you would get away with it. I did a tutorial discussion about the tech side of images which covered 8bpp and stuff so for my views on that I think that thread goes into more detail on why it can be good and where its not so good.

GP, I think 300dpi is top end. There really isn't much need to go higher. From a high dpi you can resample lower so its always nice to have too much. 200dpi should be adequate esp for printing and viewing at 1:1 scale. I would say that 100 is not enough for printing but you could get away with it for a VTT. But 50 seems to me absurdly low.

The file load time is odd in this case. I thought that the idea was that everybody would have all the tiles and that its the use and arrangement of them that makes the map. Wouldn't it be easier to get all of the players all of the tiles and then make up the map from using these images with no image download ?

[torstan]

There are two issues with VTT file-size at work here. Firstly there is the load time. Given that you need to upload the files to all players you don't want the file-size to be too large. However, at this stage you can make sure the files are small using compression of some form. If the images are jpgs then it shouldn't be too tricky to keep them under a reasonable limit. For example I use a 1MBps line at home but it uploads at 25kb, now 10Mb to each of four players is going to take a while.

Yes you can give the players the tiles beforehand, but its probably best to allow for the GM going 'oh crap - I don't have a dungeon, but I do have tiles in my library' and dropping them down in game and transferring them in real time. Obviously once they've been transferred once then they are done.

The other issue is the memory they take up in RAM. I don't know how other programmes do it, but maptool decompresses the images into memory. In this case, the format and compression of the original file is irrelevant (though I guess the with/without transparency question remains pertinent). Now one map may well not take up too much memory, but a map with tokens and objects on top of it as well will frequently run up into a hundred or so MB of RAM usage. Now given the 256MB RAM people need some of that to run their operating system, a hundred or so MB of RAM is a weight to carry. Now I'm certain other VTTs do it with less of an overhead than maptool, but thems the results I know of from playing and don't notice much of a prettiness hit.

I agree that given that the main drive of this challenge is printed tiles, 300dpi seems a good upper end. That then allows the VTT crowd to resize in nice easy increments. Sorry for derailing the thread a little, but I wanted to be a bit clearer on resizing for VTT use where maptool is involved.

[RPMiller]

I'm perfectly happy with 100 ppi images.

Since I do everything electronically I don't care about dpi at all. I only care about the ppi of an image and if that image starts off as a nice integer it makes it incredible simply and efficient to use.

[Gamerprinter]

GP, I think 300dpi is top end. There really isn't much need to go higher. From a high dpi you can resample lower so its always nice to have too much. 200dpi should be adequate esp for printing and viewing at 1:1 scale. I would say that 100 is not enough for printing but you could get away with it for a VTT. But 50 seems to me absurdly low.

Luckily for me my tiles are saved in Xara format, being vector, I can export to whatever format at whatever resolution (up to 300 ppi), since within Xara, though display resolution is 96 ppi, Xara files aren't resolution dependant.

With the same map file I can create 300 dpi print-ready versions, without having to redo or rescale anything. Its simply an export option as needed.

I generally create in inches, not pixels, working my scale per inch - once complete I export to appropriate resolution and format.

GP

[RobA]

Luckily for me my tiles are saved in Xara format, being vector, I can export to whatever format at whatever resolution (up to 300 ppi), since within Xara, though display resolution is 96 ppi, Xara files aren't resolution dependant.

With the same map file I can create 300 dpi print-ready versions, without having to redo or rescale anything. Its simply an export option as needed.

I generally create in inches, not pixels, working my scale per inch - once complete I export to appropriate resolution and format.

GP

Can you clarify this? I assume you are using image based fills, which would have a resolution limit, no?

-Rob A>

[Redrobes]

Theres two different types of use of the word 'resolution' going on here. Generally resolution is just pixels width/height of image or less often pixels per inch but what your referring to is the resolution of the pattern in the image or where the word image is the light and dark bit and not the pixel container computery parlance. If you had a very large pixel width array containing a blurry pattern thats high image resolution (computer parlance) but low spatial image resolution (real world pattern).

My patterns are blocks of repeating textures - usually done at 1024 square but sometimes 2048. In my tiles the trees were not quite big enough so they were stretched quite a bit so that the spatial image is not as high as the file image resolution. Although the JPG artifacts destroy the fine detail, the actual tree bits were not as good as some of the others bits, especially those bits where the texture had to be scaled down.

So in true spatial image resolution of the final tiles, the textures that make them up are of mixed resolution. The other option that you could have made tiles from is that the textures were generated procedurally in which case you would hope that they are generated at the required maximum amount to make the tiles. Terragen and Fractal Terrains and others are like this. The textures from CGTextures.com (which we both source from) are pretty high res (both in terms of pixel width and spatial frequency) which is great so that its very likely that any tiles have components that are higher than the tile.

So its likely that the textures are higher spatial resolution than the final tile but I think that GP was referring to the pixels per inch type version of the term.

[Gamerprinter]

Can you clarify this? I assume you are using image based fills, which would have a resolution limit, no?

-Rob A>

Its true the fills are image based, so I general only use as high a resolution of image file to start with, so reduced sizes isn't a problem. However, there is a maximum level, especially regarding large format printing.

So it is an issue. Just insure you are using large scale, hi res images to start with, everything else is vector so resize/rescale isn't as much an issue.

But Xara isn't limitless...

GP

[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.

Cobbles
Dungeon
Hatching
Marsh
MtnPath
Snow
WoodPath
WoodStream

I will add just one or two extra token type additions but thats mostly it.

Just to note I would like to declare these "Creative Commons - Non Commercial - Share alike - attribution". So spread them about a bit. And lets see any photos of them printed and used !!!

I've lost my copies and of course they've moved off of RR's temp area on his site. With the CC-NC-SA-A license, is someone perchance rehosting these somewhere?