Pre-made maps?

[Mylon]

Hi! I tried using the search function but it wasn't working for me. Where might I be able to find some pre-made maps? I'm especially interested to know if there's any pre-made generic fantasy/medieval towns done. Also maps for large buildings could be useful, such as Taverns, Temples, castles, and other such! I think having an entire town done as a map would make for an excellent immersion tool!

Even better for my purpose would be if someone has already done some of these for Eberron!

[RPTroll]

Check out the art packs under the announcements section of the forum. You can also check out the User Creation section. There are lots there.

Other resources include rpgmapshare.com and the cartographer's guild. Check out the links under the Community section on the main RPTools.net website for more ideas.

http://www.rptools.net/index.php?page=community

[Mylon]

It's good to know there are some resources out there! Unfortunately I haven't had good success with some of the maps I grabbed from rpgmapshare. The maps there looked nice, but seemed to be small. Worse, when loaded into Maptool it causes errors for a bunch of my players! A 6.4 MB file easily chewed up about 400 MB of memory in maptool, and by default it only allocates something like 256 MB.

There seems to be a lot to sort through. In particular I'm looking for LARGE maps (from medium size dungeons to potentially entire towns), done in a more simplistic style so they're not quite as busy looking and overall smaller files. Even better is if I could get maps done with vision blocking layers and other details already done! But this is not a requirement. Also, any help to using some of the files I do have would be appreciated! Not all of my players are tech savvy and I don't want to have to walk them through adjusting the memory used on load and making sure they even have that much memory in their computer. And I'm also concerned what might happen if the program exceeds 2 GB of memory used. With a relatively small map like this one: http://rpgmapshare.com/index.php?q=gall ... emId=21162 eating up 400+ MB, I'm afraid to see what a larger map might do.

[dorpond]

Welcome to the pain of working with graphic imagery, Mylon!

We all experience the pain you are talking about - the fact remains, loading a picture into memory consumes a lot of ram. This has nothing to do with Maptool. It doesn't matter if it is a picture from a 18 megapixel camera or a map drawn at high resolution - they all eat ram when viewing on a screen. Video is even worse, but that is another topic

But there is hope!

If you want a full blown town, you need to look for pre-made maps that are lower resolution. They are out there. Seek out Jonathan Roberts (Torstan on our forums) at http://www.fantasticmaps.com - he has stuff available or can make you specific stuff. Also check out http://cartographersguild.com/ since those peeps focus on towns and overland maps.

Also, the best way to not consume large amounts of memory with Maptool is to make your own maps from within Maptool. Draw roads using the drawing tools and pick only a few textures to draw with. Find 4-10 houses on the web and drop them down as background objects, and copy and paste those 10 like crazy. It won't be the prettiest map, but you will be able to make MASSIVE maps using this method. I have made maps that span miles.

Good luck!

[aliasmask]

Also, you may consider adjusting your setting to run maptool. This is my mt.cfg file:

MAXMEM=1400
MINMEM=64
STACKSIZE=2
JVM=javaw
PROMPT=false

I use the MapToolLauncher.exe to start MapTool.

I've used this setting for the last 2 years for all my games without any problems. Some people use a stack size of 3 or greater with more complicated macro sets. Sound like you need to increase your maxmem. Some of the batches use 500 and 1000 but that just limits your cached graphics and will cause more read/writes to you computer slowing things down a bit.

[torstan]

Hey Mylon. I've done a relatively simple and light weight city map - it's under the Torstan's Islands pack that you can access through the All Resource to Library... item on the maptool File menu.

For large cities - if you're dealing with single images for a map (rather than building them piece by piece in maptool) then you do need to have maps with a small pixel size. The overal sie of the map in Mb is irrelevant - that depends upon the compression. That compression has no effect on the size of the map when it's loaded into memory for viewing. So a highly compressed 4000px by 4000px map with a filesize on the hard drive of a couple of Mb will be exactly the same size in RAM in maptool as the 4000px by 4000px map with no compression which is tens or hundreds of Mb on the hard drive.

If you want a full town map with tactical level detail then you have to go down the route of Dorpond's suggestion. Find a couple of buildings and copy and paste them to build up your town. Each only gets loaded once, no matter how many times you paste them, so the memory overhead is very low.

The other option is to have one map at the zoomed out scale - say the town map in my pack - and then other maps for key locations. In that case particular Inn maps, a castle gates, a market are what you're after. I don't have too much of that, but perhaps this castle might help:
http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php? ... s_id=93547

The Cartographer's Guild is another good place to look. There's a whole section of the forum devoted to city mapping:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/forum ... ty-Mapping

[Mylon]

I guess the thing I'm really looking for is maptool format maps that utilize drawing and repeated images. I'm not after something that looks pretty so much as something that's not offensive to look at and highly functional. Many of the large image files seem far too busy for what I want and have technical limitations on top of this!

A secondary question, aimed more at the developers is that of usability. Is it possible to provide better default settings for Maptool so there's less configuration involved? And less risk of players getting stuck with a red X as the map background because they didn't allocate enough memory? I can tell maptool is some VERY powerful software, but I'm afraid with this power comes the potential to muck things up for more casual users. And it could be something as simple as not changing the default memory settings. My firefox regularly eats up 1 GB or more, so not sure why maptool would default to 256 MB.

I took a brief look at some of the work on Cartographer's Guild forums, but unfortunately most of the work there is in image format and I didn't see anything made for maptool. Perhaps I didn't look in the right places?

I did see a WIP of waterdeep though, that looked rather impressive! Except for, well, that it was done in photoshop and not maptool. This seems to be such a tough task, as image files are more universal, but not very usable in maptool.

[Azhrei]

I guess the thing I'm really looking for is maptool format maps that utilize drawing and repeated images.

We don't see those posted here very often. There are plenty of tilesets to make your own, but few people post the maps they've put together using those tilesets. I have a few that I built for my RttToEE campaign but they're not very reusable -- one represents a quasi-elemental plane of fire, and the other is an underground temple to an evil god (although that one might be semi-useful as a standalone example).

Is it possible to provide better default settings for Maptool so there's less configuration involved?

"You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time."

Because hardware capabilities vary so much, we must provide defaults that are on the lower end of the scale. It's simple, after all, to choose your own settings when you run the MapToolLauncher (on Windows). On a Mac running OSX there's more work involved, but even there it is possible to adjust the settings.

Be aware that all of your players should be using the same settings as the server so that anything that works on the server will be known to work on the clients. Now you're limited to a least common denominator scenario amongst all of the computers that will be used.

The one good thing is that the Java runtime uses memory the same way regardless of which platform it's running on, so advice for Windows applies to OSX, and vice versa.

If you want particular settings, visit our Launch page, click the CUSTOMIZATION link, and fill in the values you want. Now you'll get a launch file (ends with .jnlp) that you can email to players and everyone will get the same settings when they double-click it.

I can tell maptool is some VERY powerful software, but I'm afraid with this power comes the potential to muck things up for more casual users.

Which is why the Launch configuration is so nice.

(But be aware that the memory settings are not a factor of MapTool, but of the Java runtime environment. MapTool tends to push Java pretty hard with its graphics requirements so memory settings are more crucial while they might not be in other Java applications.)

Except for, well, that it was done in photoshop and not maptool. This seems to be such a tough task, as image files are more universal, but not very usable in maptool.

+1

You've hit the nail on the head, I think. Artists want their art to be appreciated by a large audience and that means JPG or PNG files (for example). Yes, those images can suck up a huge amount of RAM when imported into MapTool but no more than they would in any other application used to display the image. (Assuming that those apps use 24-bit color and 8-bit transparency.)

Your only option with such large images is to split them into chunks and make a separate MapTool map for each chunk. So for a city you might have a map for the "North Ward" and another for the "Docks" area. Then take the original image and scale it way down and use it as an overview of the entire city, putting it on its own MapTool map. I've done that with the city-state of Korvosa and it worked out pretty well.

Who knows? Perhaps you'll do this with one of your city maps and then post the campaign file (or the individual map export files) and start a trend here! If you do so, we have the User Creations forum for just such a project...

[wolph42]

You al so might wanna have a look at my map builder tool. You can find the link through my sig.

Slight hi jack of thread: question to more experienced mt mapbuilders: when using map tiles like the ones recently releases by dorpond, is there a way to snap them to grid so they align correctly when put them on the map?

[Bone White]

Slight hi jack of thread: question to more experienced mt mapbuilders: when using map tiles like the ones recently releases by dorpond, is there a way to snap them to grid so they align correctly when put them on the map?

I don't have much experience, but whenever I've done this, I import them as tokens, and use them as snap to grid tokens on the background layer. For tiles you want later than gargantuan, there is a "Background start snap-to-grid" option in the preferences, but apart from these options I don't know.

[Mylon]

I wonder if I could talk some people into getting together to do a group project. Multiple people can work on a map at the same time, so it's possible to cut down development time a lot by getting a group together and each building out in a particular direction, perhaps using a map from Cartographer's guild as the blueprint. There's just so much potential here, but it all depends on content.

[username]

Another option, which I have used is to reduce the quality of the images: if you load a map into GIMP, for instance, you can choose quality settings when saving as JPG. By reducing the quality you can reduce file size significantly. You have to judge for yourself, whether that's an option. B&W images with clear boundaries are better for this, so some human touch up prior to saving may prove helpful too. (I have saved up to 80% on some images that way, with a percieved eye-candy reduction (whatever that means:-) of about 25% only. Going up to 90% brought up annoying artefacts. YMMV.

[dorpond]

Slight hi jack of thread: question to more experienced mt mapbuilders: when using map tiles like the ones recently releases by dorpond, is there a way to snap them to grid so they align correctly when put them on the map?

Very easy. Go into prefs. In there you can set whether background or object layer items snap to grid or not. When set to snap on, just drag the tiles to the map. For tiles, use background layer.

It can't get any easier than that, my good man! Instant maps in record time!

[dorpond]

Slight hi jack of thread: question to more experienced mt mapbuilders: when using map tiles like the ones recently releases by dorpond, is there a way to snap them to grid so they align correctly when put them on the map?

I don't have much experience, but whenever I've done this, I import them as tokens, and use them as snap to grid tokens on the background layer. For tiles you want later than gargantuan, there is a "Background start snap-to-grid" option in the preferences, but apart from these options I don't know.

Oh man, this is the hard way! Look at my previous post.
This makes me wonder though. I always thought this was more intuitive. I guess not! I will bring this up during our 1.4/2.0 design meetings.

[Geroblue]

Not sure how useful this will be, pngs and campaign Cartographerr files, of generic towns, cities, inns, castles, villages.

entrance page for these generic maps.
http://crestar.drivein-jim.net/crestar/ ... rance-page

These are 'near by towns' first then a link to the nearby dungeons, abandoned castles.
http://crestar.drivein-jim.net/crestar/ ... arby-towns

Rather generic adventures as I don't provide stats.

Free to download and use.