Players Resizing Maps

[FunkamusPrime]

Are there any hints or tips for how players can resize/zoom maps?

Often when I send out a combat map I get players asking how to zoom in/zoom out/etc. The best I can offer is to hold control as they drag the corners to resize the map frame and try using the scroll wheel to zoom in or out.

This always ends up with the players saying they've only made a bigger mess of things, and I have to update the maps on my end to fix it (but still not to their liking since they can't reshape it).

Since I can't see what they see on their end, I'm having a hard time helping them. So can anyone offer some tips on how they can manage the maps I post? All of my players have the lite version of the software if that matters.

Thanks.

[Zeus]

You can monitor what a client will see by running a 2nd instance of FGII on the same machine your hosting the game on and like a client choosing Join a Game. Use localhost as the name of the system to connect to and choose a different username to the one your using as the host.

As for players and image window control, generally FGII and most rulesets limit control over the image window.

Players can generally resize and minimize the image window, scroll the viewpoint of the image (note it will reset to the viewpoint set by the GM once they let go of the mouse button when clicking the scroller or using the middle mouse button when dragging) as well as create pointers and drawings.

FGII mimics a real game table and so therefore enforces GM only control of fixed viewpoints, zoom and things like masks. After all we only want the players to see what the GM deems appropriate.

[BruntFCA]

One annoying thing I noticed with zoom though.

I have a very big screen so I like to control drag the Frame to be as big as possilbe. However, if I don't let go when it's reached the max size window, it starts to zoom in on the map?

I don't want it to do this, and can't understand why they implemented this unless it's a bug. What happens is that once I get to max frame size, it then messed up whats *inside* the frame by making it too big.

Then when you try to zoom out with the scroll button, you can't ,it somehow "perma zooms it". I end up closing the whole frame, and starting again. Then if I'm not careful in resizng the frame, it once gain zooms the image once the frame is at max.

[Zeus]

I think the issue you might be seeing might be a result of when you enlarge the window size disproportionally to the image's actual size.

e.g. an image we have has an actual size of 500x500 pixels. Within FGII the image window opens at 500x500, now if you widen the window size say to 750 pixels, FGII constrains the proportion of the image so it zooms and sets the viewpoint to the correct position and scale, in effect removing the bottom 250 pixels of the image from the visible viewpoint.

I guess FGII could resize the window to match the proportions of the image however some GMs do not enjoy large desktops and so some might prefer the current approach.