MapTool for Hexploration Game

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Jan van Leyden
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MapTool for Hexploration Game

Post by Jan van Leyden »

My players have reached a part of our campaign where they'll have to make some good, ol' hexploration. We usually play without friend computer.


I have now either the option to prepare some large (45 times 45 hexes) blank map and have them build the map during play or use MapTool for this Scenario, throw the map on the TV screen.

I do have a poster map I could use as base. I'd take a picture of the map and use it as background in MT. The question is: how can I handle exploring the map, i.e., revealing more of it to the players as they explore it?

As we'tre talking some 1600 hexes, I don't want to draw all those hexes to the object layer and remove them one by one.

taustinoc
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Re: MapTool for Hexploration Game

Post by taustinoc »

My first thought would be to have two instances of MT (which requires two screens, of course), so you have a GM view and a player view. Then put the big map on the Hidden layer, and create hex tokens in advance to drop onto the map as they go.

Jan van Leyden
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Re: MapTool for Hexploration Game

Post by Jan van Leyden »

Yea, two instances it would be. But the actual procedure would be just the other way round: I have the complete map, which I want to hide from the Players at first. I can introduce blank hexes in the object layer and set them to hidden once the characters can see the covered hex. I only shy away from doing this for 1500 hexes individualy.

taustinoc
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Re: MapTool for Hexploration Game

Post by taustinoc »

Jan van Leyden wrote:
Fri Feb 15, 2019 1:19 pm
Yea, two instances it would be. But the actual procedure would be just the other way round: I have the complete map, which I want to hide from the Players at first. I can introduce blank hexes in the object layer and set them to hidden once the characters can see the covered hex. I only shy away from doing this for 1500 hexes individualy.
If you do it that way, the blank hexes will cover up the main map to where you can't see it in the GM view. And you'd have to do set it all up in advance, where my way, you're dropping each hex in as they go.

If you're using the current NERPS version, maybe you could do something with fog of war and automatic VBL. You'd still have 1500 hexes, but a lot of it could be automated.

The easy way, I suspect, would be to just cover it all with VBL and manually reveal each hex as they go.

Phergus
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Re: MapTool for Hexploration Game

Post by Phergus »

Why not just use FoW? Did you know you can set the color or texture used for FoW? Set the Fog to some generic grass texture. Bonus points if you can use the same base texture use on your map. The GM will be able to see through it. Plop down a token that can only see/reveal the hex it is on plus the 6 surrounding (assuming that's how you're doing hex crawls).

kirenpollard54545
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Re: MapTool for Hexploration Game

Post by kirenpollard54545 »

If (I assume) you want actual exploration of an unknown map, may I recommend Stellaris : the perfect hybrid of Grand Strategy and 4X.
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Jagged
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Re: MapTool for Hexploration Game

Post by Jagged »

It might be worth looking for some hex map tokens. Did Torstan from Fantastic Maps produce some?
I will try and search if I get the time :)

rkyeun
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Re: MapTool for Hexploration Game

Post by rkyeun »

To get maptool to accept hexes that are integer amounts of pixels long or wide, first edit your map and set your primary hex cell dimension.
Then go to adjust grid. This will bring up two edit fields to adjust the length and width of your hexes. One of these will be a non-integer, corresponding to maptool's calculation of a perfect hex. However you don't want perfect hexes, you want it to round to the nearest pixel so that it can match your tiles, since image files can't have fractional pixels and it isn't going to use the fractions of a pixel properly anyways.
So just edit that sucker to make it an integer. Type in a higher or lower number, to try to match the actual size of your tile images, and hit enter.
Wait, what? The value changed from what you typed. It mapped from what you typed to some other number! That's not cool. Turns out MapTool has a built in mini-game you have to play and win before it will unlock proper hexagon tiling.
Well, now you have to play a guessing game. If the new number it changed to is higher than the one you want, type in a lower number than the one you tried last. If it's too low, type in a higher number than your last guess. Play hot-cold low-high with this stupid thing until what you type turns into some number ending in dot-zeroes. Write the correct guess down somewhere for future reference so you can do it again later without playing the minigame.

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