Campaigns and Maps

[Blakey]

Possibly a silly question but I've searched the documentation and can't find an answer.

What is the difference between a map and a campaign? Can you have multiple maps in one campaign? If so, once you load up a campaign, how do you select from your maps that are available?

If there are multiple maps per campaign, does doing a New Map option effectively save your old map into the campaign and then start a fresh map which is added to the campaign?

I'm using v1.2.

Cheers
Blakey

[Blakey]

Okay, sorry. Found the answer to this question by playing with the software some more.

For anyone else with the same question, the answer is that each campaign can have multiple maps (yay!) and to select which one is current you press the windowy icon in the top left corner next to where your current map name is displayed. This pops up a selection dialog.

Cool stuff!

Thanks
Blakey

[torstan]

Glad you found it. For future reference the little windowy thing is in the top right.

Feel free to ask any questions, silly or otherwise

[Full Bleed]

Actually, though I knew the difference between a map and a campaign I do have some questions regarding how large we should allow our campaigns to grow before creating separate campaigns (even though they may actually be one "campaign.")

Some of this I could probably figure out through a little testing, but it's just easier to ask.

Does the size of the campaign automatically increase the memory footprint on the host and client, or is the memory used primarily a matter of what map you actually have open in the campaign?

I ask because I would like to start building my campaign with a large world map that would almost always be available to consult. This would allow people to always have a sense of where they may be in the world. Consequently, I would like to add zooms of certain areas as they are explored, maybe even multiple zooms as character drill down into certain areas (from World map to Kingdoms to Counties to Cities to Specific locales.)

Obviously, this could grow to be an awful lot of maps over time.

I suspect that we should probably try to keep single adventures in each campaign file and not allow one campaign file to grow too large.

[trevor]

You are correct blakey

Note that Full Bleed had a good suggestion to make that more intuitive that will be implemented in 1.2b22: move the map selection and map name down to the minimap, and add a Map List to the end of the Map menu.

[dorpond]

Actually, though I knew the difference between a map and a campaign I do have some questions regarding how large we should allow our campaigns to grow before creating separate campaigns (even though they may actually be one "campaign.")

That is a hard question to answer really because of two reasons. The two main things you have to keep in mind when creating a campaign is:
1. Memory size
2. File size

The little numbers on the bottom right corner of Maotool should be watched all the time. By default, Maptool will allocate 256meg of RAM for you to use in Java. The numbers in the corner will show how much memory you are using right now (left number) and how much memory you needed to use so far in your campaign (the right number). If you see that the left number is getting close to 256, you are running close to crashing. You can adjust this 256 memory default in the Batch file when downloading the Maptool zip version. One thing to keep in mind though is that you have to make sure you have that much memory in your system and that your players do also. You will need to make sure your friends are also running the same memory configuration as you are.

The file size is also important because that determines how long it will take for the players to get their data when they connect to you the first time. If you have a 50meg campaign file and you are uploading that to 4 players at the same time, it could take a long time to upload that stuff. WHile the file size won't crash your system, it should be considered nonetheless. My demo that I showed for ICon we only around 5 or 6 meg file size. That was why people connected up resonably quick.

Does the size of the campaign automatically increase the memory footprint on the host and client, or is the memory used primarily a matter of what map you actually have open in the campaign?

No. The campaign file size has nothing to do with the memory usage. You could have 50 little maps that only utilize 50 meg of memory each. So when you flip through the maps, you are just using the memory per map - you don't add them all up. It all depends on the size of the map you have open that determines how much RAM is being used. If you have a 5000X5000 pixel map, you are going to crash with a 256 meg setting. Those map sizes gobble up memory just displaying it to screen.

I ask because I would like to start building my campaign with a large world map that would almost always be available to consult. This would allow people to always have a sense of where they may be in the world. Consequently, I would like to add zooms of certain areas as they are explored, maybe even multiple zooms as character drill down into certain areas (from World map to Kingdoms to Counties to Cities to Specific locales.)

I suspect that we should probably try to keep single adventures in each campaign file and not allow one campaign file to grow too large.

This type of scenario is perfect to pull off! I would make the overland map in Maptool to really make it large. Then as people go to certain areas of the map like that little cave in the mountains, switch the map to the cave map and have them play there. This is actually the recommended method of using Maptool if you were to ask me.

Just remember that you use a lot less memory and can make much larger maps if you make the maps within Maptool. If you were to try and bring in a large overland map that was made in another map program, you will find that the map will be very large 3000, 4000, 5000 pixels. THose just kill memory in any application.

Hope all this helps!

[trevor]

Full Bleed:

There aren't any technical limitations on the campaign size, but there are a couple things to keep in mind:

Load time
As the campaign file grows the time it takes to load it up increases. This is because the file format isn't conducive to optimization. This will be changed in 1.3, so this won't be a problem. We will provide a converter tool that will load the 1.2 and change them into 1.3, so you should be good to go to get started. The primary expense is loading in all the images.

Memory
This is something you don't really have to worry about. When you switch maps, it unloads the old map from memory, so in essence you only have exactly one map in memory at any given time.

Reliability
As the campaign file grows, it implicitly contains more information, which means greater loss if anything happens to the file. You should definitely keep backups of your campaign files, especially if using the development releases. The point is keeping smaller campaign files means less loss if one goes kaboom. This is a valid principle regardless of the actual program though (eg: I wouldn't keep my entire life's diary in a single word document).

Player Transfer Times
The actual content of the campaign that gets sent to the clients is actually quite small, the big killer is the images. So whether you have one campaign or 10, they still have to download the same amount of information. Note that the players only download the images on demand when visiting a map for the first time, so getting them up and running is a matter of just transferring the image assets for the first map.

Generally, I'd temper expansion by load times, which is really the biggest bottleneck atm.

[trevor]

I would like to add zooms of certain areas as they are explored, maybe even multiple zooms as character drill down into certain areas (from World map to Kingdoms to Counties to Cities to Specific locales.)

Something that I've been wanting to add for a while now are transfer points, click on them and you switch to a new location. Look for these in 1.3

[thelevitator]

You will need to make sure your friends are also running the same memory configuration as you are.

Yikes! I didn't know that! I have mine set to 1Gb because I have 2Gb in my computer. I know that everyone else was running the standard 256Mb on their laptops. We didn't have a single problem on Sunday though. How big of an issue is it to have everyone at the same memory setting? I don't want the thing to crash on anyone during a session.

[Phergus]

It's potentially a real problem if all of your clients are using the default 256MB.

Load up a 6K x 6K map or so and you're clients will be seeing stuff like:

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space

While you'll be fine.

[trevor]

You will need to make sure your friends are also running the same memory configuration as you are.

Yikes! I didn't know that! I have mine set to 1Gb because I have 2Gb in my computer. I know that everyone else was running the standard 256Mb on their laptops. We didn't have a single problem on Sunday though. How big of an issue is it to have everyone at the same memory setting? I don't want the thing to crash on anyone during a session.

for clarification, you only need the "same" configuration so that you don't exceed someone's memory. That is, if you have it set at 1g, and your player has it at 256m, then when you load your big map, they will run out of memory. You just have to make sure that they have sufficient memory set up to handle the largest map in your campaign.

[thelevitator]

Got it! Thanks Trevor!

[Amaril]

Regarding map sizes and memory configurations of clients and servers, there definitely needs to be some more obvious documentation on that.

[trevor]

Regarding map sizes and memory configurations of clients and servers, there definitely needs to be some more obvious documentation on that.

Definitely. I think it would be useful to put something into the tool that helps GMs know how big their campaigns are.

[Dalna]

I know that this is not the time and maybe the wrong forum, but there still seems to be a memory leak where as you load more and more maps that your total memory used is not going back to where it should be as if this was the first map loaded. Is this planned on being fixed? For example you can load a small campaign, if you continues to load campaigns replacing the last one and such. Sooner or latter your memory is going to be maxed out. And it will crash maptools. Now I am not saying we do this often, but it would be nice if maybe the program can clean some of it up.