Adjustable bounding boxes.

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Full Bleed
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Adjustable bounding boxes.

Post by Full Bleed »

Hi everyone.

First I'd like to say that I checked out this program probably 6-9 months ago and for some reason it didn't stick... but recently I downloaded and started playing around with 1.2.b16 and have been really impressed so far with what I'm seeing. I have a lot to learn about the program yet, but I think some kudos are in order...

Great job guys! The speed at which this is developing and the level of commitment and engagement by the contributors is to be commended. :)

That said, I had a couple suggestions I was hoping you might be able to consider and I'll put them in separate posts.

The first is in regard to being able to adjust the bounding box around images inside the game. As it is right now, the way the game auto-sizes images to fit in predetermined size categories, and the way we can change those sizes is really fantastic. However, it is rather geared to images that are perfectly square to get accurate sizing. Extraneous graphic elements (like weapons sticking off bodies) affect the "core" of the image negatively.

I'm a top-down guy (and this problem would exist with top down too), but since there aren't as many great top-down figures available out there I've been putting together a large collection of front-shot figures. Using a couple front shot figures, I'll illustrate my point:

Image

Assume for a moment that the Green Slaad and Ice Devil are the same size. Because the Ice Devil has a long spear, Maptools is shrinking the Devil to fit him inside the box. If I could change the bounding box in game to adjust his size based off a new "core" then the image would display more accurately (snapping in the grids better and adjusting to the built in size options better.) Below is an illustration of what I would probably adjust the new core of the Ice Devil to:

Image


This would also have a second benefit with regard to the flexibility of the kind of graphics one could import without having to edit them specifically to work better in maptools. In this example, I actually had to go into my Ice Devil and size the PNG file to be square (it was rectangle) so that it more accurately filled 4 squares in the game when set to "Large." Otherwise, it was only filling 2 squares with some overflow beneath it. That didn't make for a very accurate range determination.

Thoughts?

Dalna
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Post by Dalna »

Well Why not make then fit a 2x2 hexes and place them to the bottom right withe the extra space north and west of them. Make sure this is invisible. then just make them large when you place them...they will take 2x2 hexes but the size will be right always and your spear and all can go out side of the square. The only problem with this is if you do it top down it will not rotate right I believe...they have not yet set a rotation spot for tokens. (its the center of the token...So I am unsure I can help ytou that much.

You can be sneaky about it as the DM. place it as a backround or object. Set it as freesize then switch it back to a token. IF you saved it at the right size you will be able to use it at the drawn size this way.

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Full Bleed
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Post by Full Bleed »

Dalna wrote:Well Why not make then fit a 2x2 hexes and place them to the bottom right withe the extra space north and west of them. Make sure this is invisible.
I think you're going to have to give me a step-by-step to explain what you're saying here. You might be talking about some feature in Maptools that I'm not familiar with.

I'm simply deploying the figure from the image explorer. How and where do I edit the image as you've explained above?

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Post by Phergus »

It is something you would have to do in Gimp, Photoshop or some other paint program with alpha-channel support.

Basically take the size of that smaller bounding box and make a new, empty canvas of twice that size in both X and Y dimensions.

Then take your ice devil and drop him into the lower left corner.

So if you imagine that your new canvas doesn't represent a 1 square critter but a 2x2 critter you will see that your ice devil is in that lower-left square while his spear extends up to the top-right square.

Save with transparency.

Now bring it into MapTool and make it a "large" creature. The image you made will be mapped to a 2x2 grid and your ice devil will be in only one square with his spear partly hanging outside.

Rotation and facing will be an issue with this method.

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trevor
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Post by trevor »

Full Bleed, welcome back :) I love suggestions.

actually, I've wanted to do that for a while now, and have been making small little adjustments along the way to get to that. Now that the token dialog is broken up into tabs, I'm planning to put a component on the Config tab where you can specify the bounding box, and center point, so that you can tailor the way the tokens sit in the cell.

Eventually tokentool will be able to specify this information as well so that you don't have to set it for each token.
Dreaming of a 1.3 release

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Post by Phergus »

Looking forward to this capability. That is one area where BattlegroundsRPG token handling is better.

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Full Bleed
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Post by Full Bleed »

Phergus wrote:It is something you would have to do in Gimp, Photoshop or some other paint program with alpha-channel support.
Ultimately, I'd rather not have to do too much prep outside Maptools, especially if a future change might alter how the program would read the newly prepped files. It's easy enough to square off the files so they are properly centered within the scope of how MT imports graphics, but I'd hate to have to do anything more specific than that.

I like how MT takes any size graphic and fills the square, then scales up from there. It just needs this one little tweak to allow us to perfect it.

trevor wrote:actually, I've wanted to do that for a while now, and have been making small little adjustments along the way to get to that. Now that the token dialog is broken up into tabs, I'm planning to put a component on the Config tab where you can specify the bounding box, and center point, so that you can tailor the way the tokens sit in the cell.
That would be great. :)

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trevor
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Post by trevor »

I'm madly working on smoothing out 1.2 issues so that we can release it. Look for this feature early on in 1.3 development
Dreaming of a 1.3 release

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