Interactive Maps + MapTool


Technology


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

I am about to start a Hell's Rebels campaign via Maptool. I was quite excited about using the Interactive Maps to save myself a fair bit of trouble mapping out the maps by hand.

Except...

It seems that the interactive maps are not to any consistent scale, as far as I can tell. That is to say, the grid squares are distorted and occasionally different sizes, and do not cleanly align to any grid scale.

This is, to put it mildly, extremely frustrating.

Has anyone else tried using the interactive maps with maptool? Have you run into the same problem, and is there anything that can be done about it?

Liberty's Edge

MaxAstro wrote:

I am about to start a Hell's Rebels campaign via Maptool. I was quite excited about using the Interactive Maps to save myself a fair bit of trouble mapping out the maps by hand.

Except...

It seems that the interactive maps are not to any consistent scale, as far as I can tell. That is to say, the grid squares are distorted and occasionally different sizes, and do not cleanly align to any grid scale.

This is, to put it mildly, extremely frustrating.

Has anyone else tried using the interactive maps with maptool? Have you run into the same problem, and is there anything that can be done about it?

Get your maps roughly the right size, turn off the lines in the interactive map, put it in your virtual desktop, and use the grid from the virtual desktop.

Sovereign Court RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32

I've been using Maptools for years with the maps from the APs, and yes, sometimes the squares don't line up well. Sometimes the map changes scales between regions as well. Our group has just learned to live with it.

Another solution is simply to turn off snapping to grid in Maptools and go freeform. That's the preferred method for one of our players.


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I use maps from all sorts of sources, and I have a method that lines up the grid really well.

Open the image file in an image editor. I use IrfanView because it has a lot of features for a free program and is good at resizing.

If the image has wall to wall squares, count how many squares across the image is. If the grid does not go to the edge of the image file, use the measuring too to measure how many pixels are in a long set of grid squares. I try to use at least 10.

Divide the number of pixels by the number of squares. If this divides evenly, then set your grid to that size. You're done!

If it doesn't then round off this number to the nearest whole number and multiply it by the number of squares. This number get multiplied by the width of the image and then dived by the width of the section. This lets you know what size to scale the width of the whole image to.

For example. A picture is 3997 pixels across. 10 squares of the image are 488 pixels across. This is 48.8 pixels per square. Since it's not a round number, the grid won't work. Round it up to 50 pixels per square. The section is 500. Multiply 500 by 3997 and then divide by 488. This is 4095.28. Set the new image width to 4095 pixels and the grid should line up well.

Silver Crusade

MapAlign Tool

However, I ran into the same issue with the Hell's Vengeance maps, and MapAlign didn't solve the problem since the grid was just plain inconsistent. I ended up just using the un-gridded map and then putting the best grid I could on top of it (this was in Fantasy Grounds, not MapTool, but I'm assuming the grid functionality is mostly identical).


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

Thanks guys, that's a fair bit of super helpful advice. :)

Turns out the one map I was getting frustrating on lines up way better than I thought it did, I just fail at math... Thought a certain room was 3 squares by 4 squares, it was actually 4 squares by 5... map lined up way better once I adjusted that properly.

I'll check out MapAlign for sure, though.

Scarab Sages

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Yeah, having been running PF games for a decade with Maptool, Paizo's pdf'd maps are always horrible on consistent x:y length. Sometimes its a manageable 1-2 px difference over 20 squares, sometimes its a problematic 5-6 px over the same 20 squares. This is at native size (copy and paste right from the pdf) without scaling

What I usually do is after extracting the image from the pdf, open it in GIMP. Pull out the measure tool and get your measurements along a long line in the middle of the image. Determine what you want your square size in MT to be (25 or 30 works best if the x:y is nastier, because dropping it so small wipes out a lot of the error), then scale the image by the scale factor.

Spoiler:
Scale factor
using 20 squares as an example, with 30px as your MT target:
154px / 20 squares = 7.7px / square
30px / 7.7 px = 3.8986 scale factor * 100 = 389.86%

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