Worth Upgrading From 1.3b28?

[Blakey]

Hi Guys,

Hope you are all well.

Been a long time since I popped by here, but I'm still using MapTool each and every week for my weekly (now 4E) D&D campaign. I'm running Shackled City Adventure Path (SCAP) which I'm converting on the fly.

Anyway, I'm still (happily) running v1.3b28 which is clearly very old now. However it appears to do everything I need. But maybe MapTool has advanced to the stage where its worth me upgrading. I really dont have the time to trawl through probably a year's worth of posts to see what has changed so I'm going to ask you guys to let me know if its worth my while to upgrade.

This is my current set up, in terms of what I have to do when doing Preparation for a game:

- I download the players maps for SCAP from the net. These are the same ones as are in the DM's map book, but have already been fixed up so all the room numbers, secret doors and other DMs stuff are gone. Perfect for MapTool.
- I then scale them to 50 pixels per square using GIMP. If the base scale is less than 50 I scale down to a nice round number anyway.
- I then open up MapTool and create a "New Map" using the JPG file and then slide the grid around to match up with the squares already on all the maps.
- Next I switch on FOW, and blank out the whole map apart from the starting chamber which I reveal.
- I save the campaign and all my prep is done.

Note that I do not set up any Light Blocking Layer stuff (or whatever it is called these days).

When it comes to play time we have a projector on the wall which, when connected to my laptop, throws an image onto our dining room table, which we have a whiteboard on so the table top is perfect for projecting onto and so we can scribble stuff on in marker pen when needed. People keep track of HP and such on there when needed.
When it comes to MapTool, I run 2 copies - one which runs the server and displays the DMs copy of the map on my lappy screen and the other, the client, which I throw onto the projector in Full Screen Mode and shows that my PCs can see.
Works a treat.

Now, when it comes to the FoW I have tried loads of different options. I used to spend hours setting up the Light Blocking Layer and then have tokens with vision and all sorts. This is incredibly realistic, but for our group we found it was too slow and all the attention was on the technology and moving tokens around, and not on the D&D. So now I just reveal the FoW a room at a time as the PCs come into them. If rooms are big or complex and they can't see it all, I sometimes reveal the FoW by hand using the tools. But I often find, for pure fun purposes, it's fine to reveal more of the upcoming room than the characters could reasonably see so the players can see the whole encounter area and plan tactics accordingly. Unrealistic, certainly, but it seems to work well with 4E's style and is usually a lot of fun, which is what I am after.

As a result our games are now slick, the maps are awesome, the players only get to see the map revealed bit by bit as they move around, yet in encounter situations they can see all the encounter area laid out in front of them. Everyone has fun. Oh, and MapTool NEVER, EVER crashes on me. Its been 100% reliabale and its great.

So, after that long drawn out description of where we are now, here, finally is my question!!! :-

Is it worth me updating to the latest and greatest (stable) version of MapTool? And if yes, why? What features will it give me that I'll use which will make my game better?

Many thanks for your ear!
Blakey

[biodude]

Someone else will hopefully correct any misunderstandings I'm about to promulgate, but here goes:

My impression is that the biggest developments in MapTool in recent builds is the macro scripting functions, which can be used to track stats like HP, etc. That might be a good reason, but could require a bit of technical set-up, with the advantage that it can greatly speed up play by handling a lot of the math for you. Add token states (condition icons, etc.) to the mix, and there's a lot of potential power. Not necessarily stable, in my experience, and complicated macros require some technical attention, like watching out for memory useage. If you are using it for face-to-face playing, then I suspect your chat window is relatively empty, so this might work well for you.
I would personally recommend waiting until 1.3 is finalized and stable, which is expected in the relatively near future, and hopefully by then, many of the macro features will be more stable, and performance will be less of an issue. I started a bunch of macro development in b47, but when I tried updating to b49, changes in the macro parsing rendered a bunch of my macros non-functional (my fault, not MapTools'), so I've gone back to b47 until 1.3 is done. Then, I'll fix everything so it works again, and add a few new features not possible in earlier builds.

If you don't care about Macros, I have seen references to performance enhancements to the graphical aspects of MapTool, particularly vision & lighting, which you may be interested in: not new features, but improvements to existing ones. I can't remember when the new lighting system came in, but if you handle FoW manually, then you probably won't be excited about that, anyway.

I guess it really depends on how you use MapTools, and what you want from it. If you do try a newer version, be sure to make a backup copy of your campaign file, as once it's opened in a newer build, older builds might not be able to open it again.

BTW, Amaril described a really simple way to match maps to fit a grid (& vice versa) without having to resize the map images in external programs, or re-calculate grid sizes, if you are interested:
http://forums.rptools.net/viewtopic.php ... 6&start=15

I've actually discovered a really easy way to manage scaling maps directly within MapTool. It involves scaling both the grid and the map so that the dimensions sort of meet each other halfway. Basically, it relies on the more granular approach of scaling an image rather than the incremental approach of scaling the grid. It might not be new to others, but it is to me.

1. Select a black "quickmap"
2. Insert an existing map on top of it as a background object.
3. Set your grid to a close approximation of the grid on the image.
4. Resize the image object by hand until it's close enough.

It took far less time (less than a minute) to scale the map and grid this way than it did using the traditional method.

I use this ALL the time now, and It's saved me a lot of headaches. It also makes it easy to put multiple map images together to make giant maps. There's an impressive demo somewhere of maps of different scales layered together allowing you to scroll down from a planetary view all the way down to a single token, with different maps filling the view at different scales.
I have only found 2 issues with this method, which I doubt will ever affect you the way you describe using mapTool:

• Rotating a map (change to a "top-down" token and then change facing) and then re-sizing it can trigger a bug whereby the re-size map image gets the new dimensions, but the image rotates back to the original orientation. Rarely an issue unless you're making freakish maps like me, but there it is.
• There might be performance issues with loading multiple maps to the background layer & making them huge. Don't know for sure, and haven't noticed, but wouldn't surprise me.

There are also some other tools to help fit maps to a grid, if you are interested, in the "How To" section of the MapTools Forum.

Happy Gaming

[Blakey]

Cheers for the swift reply.

Actually, you metion something I had forgotten about which is vital to my situation: I have gazillions of v1.3b28 campaign files which absolutely would need to be valid in whichever versoion I upgrade to, if I do. There is no way I'm reproducing the hours of work I have put into creating them, even if my new method is relatively quick and painless.

I'm not interested in macros particularly, and I dont even use Tokens anymore at all - we just use MT to project a map onto the tabletop and then use plastic minis for all our PCs and NPCs. I track HP etc actually on the game table using a OHP pen - recording damage done to each monster, rather than how many HP it has left. When the monster goes bloodied I switch to recording its damage in red pen so the players know that a given monster is Bloodied. Okay, again it gives the players a little extra info but we're happy with the system and its very quick to use at the table, so that's fine.

I'm not using light or vision as such, other than just using FoW manually as posted above.

Example things which would be great for my set up, which I deffo would upgrade for would be:

1. Projector Mode. Not having to run a server and a client but doing it all from one executable of MT would be a great step forward.
2. Ease of scaling JPGs when they are brought into MT somehow - which would cut out the need for GIMP. This is probably way beyond what MT is for of course.

Does MT have any support for 4E specifically? For example, 4E now has specific new effects like "Blast 4" or "Close Burst 3". If MT supported those easily I could see that being useful for quickly applying spell effects to the battle map and seeing which minis were effected. I can probably do this with MT 1.3b28 already If I look carefully of course. Not sure.

Cheers
Blakey

[jfrazierjr]

Does MT have any support for 4E specifically? For example, 4E now has specific new effects like "Blast 4" or "Close Burst 3". If MT supported those easily I could see that being useful for quickly applying spell effects to the battle map and seeing which minis were effected. I can probably do this with MT 1.3b28 already If I look carefully of course. Not sure.

Cheers
Blakey

There are new templates Jay added for 4E sometime around the b38-b42 or so release. They allow for blasts, bursts, and walls. There have been some talk about the blasts not being 100% accurate given an interpretation of the rules, but I don't know that anyone has gotten a final answer from WotC either.

If you don't use tokens, then the macro changes and the lighting/vision changes are really probably not worth the upgrade. As biodude stated, if you do download a newer version to play with, make a copy of all of your campaign files(preferably in a different directory and open the copy. I doubt you will have any problems opening an older campaign file in a newer version, BUT YOU WILL not be able to save said campaign in the new version and then open in an older version. Ditto for any saved tokens from the new version cannot be "imported" into the old campaign.

[biodude]

Actually, you metion something I had forgotten about which is vital to my situation: I have gazillions of v1.3b28 campaign files which absolutely would need to be valid in whichever versoion I upgrade to, if I do. There is no way I'm reproducing the hours of work I have put into creating them, even if my new method is relatively quick and painless.

The only incompatibilities with newer versions I was referring to are only relevant to macros. If your older campaign files don't use macros, then there's no reason they should not work in a newer version (nevertheless, backup before testing!).

Example things which would be great for my set up, which I deffo would upgrade for would be:

1. Projector Mode. Not having to run a server and a client but doing it all from one executable of MT would be a great step forward.

I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think this feature has been implemented yet. That said, it is frequently requested, and I believe it's on the roadmap for the next version of MapTools (1.4).

2. Ease of scaling JPGs when they are brought into MT somehow - which would cut out the need for GIMP. This is probably way beyond what MT is for of course.

See the quote in my last post, and link to other threads that describe how you can quite easily drop a map file onto the MapTools' "background" layer, essentially as a token. Go into it's token properties and make sure that "snap to grid" is unchecked, and "Free Size" is selected. You can then freely resize the map image as a "stamp"/token to fit your grid, or vice versa, including changing aspect ratios, or rotating (note the bug I describe that applies to rotated maps/"top-down" tokens). Of course, this makes the map more dynamic, and you can accidentally click & move it if you are on the background layer, but as long as you do most of your manipulation on the token layer, I have come to LOVE this method. This method should work in earlier versions, as far as I know, so may not have to upgrade just for this.

From what you describe, if you have a set-up that works, unless there are some new features you really want, why upgrade? Then again, even I can't remember all the stuff that's been added since b28, so it might be worth trying it out. Just keep the older version of MapTools around (and backup any campaign files you try out in the newer build).

Cheers