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Map: Moisture Trap Compound

Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2012 12:19 am
by joshsziegler
Moisture Trap:
Update: I fixed the links and added a link to all of my maps.
License: Public Domain
Background: This is a fairly low-tech moisture trap facility which was put under ground to avoid detection and help lower the internal temperature. Minimal supplies for repairs are in crate indoors, but most other goods are kept off site to avoid burglars. A small shaft provides access to the piping connecting the various moisture traps surrounding the facility. The shabby building above ground has a well-hidden hatch which provides the only access to the rest of the compound. Due to the open troughs and poor seal on the facility, plant life has flourished above the tanks, which might tip off the observant. The satellite dish is a recent addition. Now that the facilities' operators are well established, they have come to the conclusion that having more data on the traps outweighs the risk of discovery.

Steel Rat: You'll notice the background is yours: http://forums.rptools.net/viewtopic.php?f=77&t=308. You didn't put any note about license, but if you want me to take this down, please let me know.

Advice and/or comments are welcome. I didn't put much effort into this one since I needed it this week... and it shows.

Re: Map: Moisture Trap Compound

Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2012 8:36 am
by jfrazierjr
Thanks for sharing.

Now for some GIMP advice. I would highly suggest you(and everyone else) get into the habit of using layer masks. They do take a bit more work up front, but give you FAR more flexibility in the long run(unless you working on a throw away thing that you KNOW you will never edit). Also, have you considered using GIMP 2.8(and if you are using it) and it's layer group feature? While not really important for MapTool, by grouping into a layer group all of you underground features, you can hide all of those with a single click on the layer group's visibility icon(unfortunately layer masks can't be assigned at the group level and affect all it's sub layers until GIMP 2.10...) This would make it much easier to show/hide parts of the map for export to jpg quickly.

Re: Map: Moisture Trap Compound

Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2012 9:46 am
by wolph42
nice map, thanks for sharing!!

Re: Map: Moisture Trap Compound

Posted: Mon Sep 24, 2012 10:20 pm
by Azhrei
That's very cool, thanks for sharing. :)

You may want to consider a Creative Commons license instead of Public Domain. You may not perfectly understand the differences, but if you visit CreativeCommons.org you can find some descriptive text comparing the various licenses.

Re: Map: Moisture Trap Compound

Posted: Tue Sep 25, 2012 2:16 am
by wolph42
Thats interesting, you made me curious so i looked it up and the short of it and (to my surprise) under public domain others can claim your work and put a restrictive and commercial license on derivative works while the cc enforces the same license to any derivative. I would not have guessed that.

Re: Map: Moisture Trap Compound

Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2012 5:30 pm
by Azhrei
Many people don't. :(

Another common misconception is that "open source" == "free software" -- they are not the same. All free software is open source, but not all open source is free software. The end result is that open source is pretty much useless in the long-term while free software is very valuable (but there are trade-offs).

That's what I love about the CC licenses: they provide 3-4 licenses that cover the common ways that people want to share their results with the world and those few licenses cover 95% of the situations.

Re: Map: Moisture Trap Compound

Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2012 7:06 pm
by joshsziegler
I would highly suggest you(and everyone else) get into the habit of using layer masks. They do take a bit more work up front, but give you FAR more flexibility in the long run(unless you working on a throw away thing that you KNOW you will never edit). Also, have you considered using GIMP 2.8(and if you are using it) and it's layer group feature?
I'm a total graphics/GIMP newbie, so thanks for the tips!
You may want to consider a Creative Commons license instead of Public Domain. You may not perfectly understand the differences, but if you visit CreativeCommons.org you can find some descriptive text comparing the various licenses.
Despite the thought of someone copyrighting a derivative, I still feel that public domain is what I want. Don't get me wrong, I use GPL/MIT licenses on all my code and love the CC licenses, but when I think back to why MapTool is so awesome, I can't help but think of the mapping torrent everyone uses. Being able to quickly grab a single pack chock full of almost anything you need basically made this tool what it is for me. Putting something like that together is a lot of work though, even if you just have to abide by CC-BY. So the point is, I want to make it dead simple for someone to grab my work and throw it in something like that torrent. I don't care about being mentioned - as long as someone finds it useful. I'm willing to tolerate the potential for misuse for it to be easier to use.

Note: I am aware of the Dundjinni forums and RPG MapShare, but the point is ease of bootstrapping. If i'm a new user or on a new computer (I've had my collection of images lost twice now), I don't want to comb through forums or download the dozens of albums on RPGMS to get started.

Re: Map: Moisture Trap Compound

Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2012 7:21 pm
by Azhrei
Okay, that's cool. It certainly sounds like you understand the licensing issues. :)