A Question about Map Size

[Greygor]

Apologies if this has already been asked and answered, searching for map and size gives a lot of thread results to try and search through.

There's a lot of good people out there who provide very good free maps and a lot of tutorials on creating maps.

My question is more to do with sizing and file size.

Is there a recommended sizing for use in FG II,

For instance; I have a map that's 6000 x 5000 pixels and 96 DPI, now that comes to a 15 MB file size. Which is small until you consider uploading it to clients through FG. A 5' square is 150x150 pixels.

If I wanted to optimize that by reducing the size what would be a good pixel size for a 5 ' square, 50 x 50, 100x100.

And carrying on from this when creating my own maps what size should represent a 5'x5' square.

[Tiqon]

I use 50 pixels for each 10X10. but the size? I would say as small as possible ;). In my latest module I had a map that was 1.5 MB. That was a pain to demask....

[JohnD]

Generally I think people try to keep maps/pictures to less than 1 mb... probably 1/2 that can still get you good resolution.

It is all a trade off though. A simply amazing map is great, but if you have to stop the game for 15 minutes for everyone to load it, well... that might be not so great.

[Greygor]

Yeah, I'm going to experiment in sizing and quality.

For a start I've generated 3 versions of the map, 150, 100 and 50 per 5' square. and see what that does to file size and image quality.

From there on it's time to tweak to find a happy medium.


I think the bottle neck in the past has been my upload speed, but getting fibre optic this week which will increase download and upload 10 fold so that should solve that issue :)

[Trenloe]

It seems that most people use something like a 50x50 for a 5 foot square, or it has been mentioned that multiples of 64 are good - as the new tokens/pogs are 128x128 in size (they are all the same size, even if they are a dragon or a goblin - each is 128 x 128).

Or, to confuse matters, if maps are being extracted from PDFs the pixel size of a 5 foot square could change from map to map - I just go with whatever size the extracted map is.

Some people use PNG files for their maps - these are better quality, but can be quite large - I tend to use JPGs as they are smaller in size with (usually) very little loss in quality.

For tokens (going slightly off topic, but related), you can resize them (CTRL-Mousewheel while hovering over the token) or you can zoom the map until the token fits the grid and then right-click on the token and lock the token size. This last option (lock token size) works very well if all of the tokens you use are of the same size.

[Tiqon]

I have found that maps with grid all ready on it works best if I make sure each grid field is 50 pixels, hence the earlier post. If I dont make it so I will have to much hassle making the grid made in FG2 fit. I have had a lot frustrations about that early on. I did not figure this out myself (I'm not that smart ;)), but saw it in a video here https://www.fantasygrounds.com/filelibrary/tutorial/xorne-rescale-1a.wmv (found in the download section all the way down the page in the right side).

[Trenloe]

Grids can be a pain to make fit. Some more recent rulesets (3.5e, 4e, Rolemaster, Savage Worlds, but not Castles & Crusades that I know of) have a grid fitting menu on the image (click the "bars" icon in the top left of an image then the "grid" icon, which will only show if you have a grid set). This menu allows you to expand or reduce the grid size and nudge it into position - makes it a lot easier to make a grid fit as best you can.

[Torgaard]

Well, I can tell you how I approach it with my maps (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15833), bearing in mind that I use Photoshop (CS6):

My maps are designed to be used with a 50 pixel grid in Fantasy Grounds.
I've made maps as big as the 6000x5000 map you're talking about, but it makes for a big file (obviously). Consider splitting in half maybe? To my mind, 15mb is way WAY too big. It might be something that's just been bug fixed over time with releases of the table, but awhile back I was making really big (file size) maps, and let's just say the table crashed alot, usually when working with the map. Now I make maps in the 2-3mb range, and I can't remember the last time the table crashed.
That's my goal with maps by the way: I want them less than 3mb. If it's a huge map, and I just GOTTA have it; 4mb is my absolute cutoff.
I work in 72 dpi in Photoshop
I stricly use .jpg's when making maps. Do not save as .png's for maps. Jpg's can be compressed to a fraction of the size of .png files. I only use .png files when I need a transparent background (tokens, etc)
I turn the compression down on my .jpg's when I save them. The original is obviously cranked up, but the saved map for the table gets turned down. Presumably they use different methods with different graphics applications, but in Photoshop it's a slider from 1 to 12. I turn my compression down from 12 (max) to typically around like 9 or 10 when I save my maps for use in the table. It will typically shave a couple meg off the file size.
THIS (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=4026&d=1364093477) is a recent map. I kinda feel like that's a nice compromise between detail and size of the file. It's a pretty busy map, it's got alotta stuff in it, it's pretty big at 2500x2500, it's not really losing much in quality, and it's a mere 1.9mb

[Greygor]

Well, I can tell you how I approach it with my maps (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15833), bearing in mind that I use Photoshop (CS6):

My maps are designed to be used with a 50 pixel grid in Fantasy Grounds.
I've made maps as big as the 6000x5000 map you're talking about, but it makes for a big file (obviously). Consider splitting in half maybe? To my mind, 15mb is way WAY too big. It might be something that's just been bug fixed over time with releases of the table, but awhile back I was making really big (file size) maps, and let's just say the table crashed alot, usually when working with the map. Now I make maps in the 2-3mb range, and I can't remember the last time the table crashed.
That's my goal with maps by the way: I want them less than 3mb. If it's a huge map, and I just GOTTA have it; 4mb is my absolute cutoff.
I work in 72 dpi in Photoshop
I stricly use .jpg's when making maps. Do not save as .png's for maps. Jpg's can be compressed to a fraction of the size of .png files. I only use .png files when I need a transparent background (tokens, etc)
I turn the compression down on my .jpg's when I save them. The original is obviously cranked up, but the saved map for the table gets turned down. Presumably they use different methods with different graphics applications, but in Photoshop it's a slider from 1 to 12. I turn my compression down from 12 (max) to typically around like 9 or 10 when I save my maps for use in the table. It will typically shave a couple meg off the file size.
THIS (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=4026&d=1364093477) is a recent map. I kinda feel like that's a nice compromise between detail and size of the file. It's a pretty busy map, it's got alotta stuff in it, it's pretty big at 2500x2500, it's not really losing much in quality, and it's a mere 1.9mb


Some useful info there, thanks.

I seem to remember some youtube videos on creating Maps in photoshop, might have to check them out.

I shy away from photoshop sometimes because of the sheer range of things you can do befuddles me.

[Torgaard]

Actually, that was DrZeuss who whipped up those (awesome) videos. A couple of his techniques in those videos were really helpful to me as well. They kinda got me thinking in certain directions that had kind of a snowball effect on how I do stuff.

And ya; Photoshop can be a little daunting. I've been using it off and on for like 10 years, and while it's a tired old saying; I truly do learn something new every day with Photoshop.

[Mgrancey]

I range between 25x25 to 50x50, depending on the size of the map. I generally try to keep the map from blanketing the screen. Alot of the time I end up using 30x30. Which keeps a map (on its longest side) under a 1000px across.

[Zeus]

Actually, that was DrZeuss who whipped up those (awesome) videos. A couple of his techniques in those videos were really helpful to me as well. They kinda got me thinking in certain directions that had kind of a snowball effect on how I do stuff.

And ya; Photoshop can be a little daunting. I've been using it off and on for like 10 years, and while it's a tired old saying; I truly do learn something new every day with Photoshop.

Thanks for the nice comment Torgaard. Nice to know the videos have helped inspire more mapping with Photoshop. I luv PS. Still on CS5 though as my company decided not to update to CS6 this year :( Damned austerity measures ... Still CS5 still contains stuff I haven't used yet so I guess there's no rush.

As for me here are the principals I work to:

- paint my maps in PS usually to a 72dpi 8-bit RGB canvas, resolution for the grid scale is usually 256x256px. (for me drawing/painting at a bigger scale is easier and allows for intricate detail - where required), depending on size of canvas (between 1500x1500px and 10,000x10,000px) this can generate .PSD file (of reasonable complexity) sizes between 90Mb and 250MB.
- rescale the maps down to a 50x50px grid size resolution (if very large) or down to 100x100px (if small to medium size e.g. encounter only)
- saving as a JPG (with 9-12 quality/compression) usually results in JPGs of between .5MB and 1.5MB in size.

On a decent broadband connection with a conservative (by today's standards) upload channel of 1Mb this should result in decent share times (few secs) with 4 clients.

I prefer the 50x50px and 100x100px grid sizes for VTT as anything larger tends to generate longer share times per map or you end up with lots of different maps to encompass a larger area. Anything smaller leads to indistinguishable features of the map when in play and you zoom in.

I guess the other things to take into account is size of map grid vs size of tokens. You want to align the medium size token (most common size) and match it to the grid size you will most often use. This will save a the step having to manually re-size your tokens when you first drop them to a map.

All my medium tokens use a 50x50px size.

[S Ferguson]

Thanks for the nice comment Torgaard. Nice to know the videos have helped inspire more mapping with Photoshop. I luv PS. Still on CS5 though as my company decided not to update to CS6 this year :( Damned austerity measures ... Still CS5 still contains stuff I haven't used yet so I guess there's no rush.


No there certainly isn't a rush to upgrade. Apparently, from industry leaders, anything that can be done in CS6 can be done just as easily in CS5. The main feature improvements were mostly in shared work environments, more connection with Adobe Air, Minor Bridge improvements, etc. So it's mostly administrator stuff. At least that was the Gamasutra Review. And your video was great. It helped me a lot as well.

Cheers,
SF