Princes of the Apocalypse Maps? High Quality?

[cyphus5]

So, I bought Curse of Strahd and was very much impressed with the maps and their quality (especially when used as battle maps). However, I found the maps with Storm King's Thunder to be poor resolution and quality in comparison.

Question then, what about the maps in Princes of the Apocalypse? Can anyone speak for the quality of these maps as battle maps?

[LordEntrails]

I didn't have a concern with the PotA maps. Though I admit I don't have much in the way of expectations for maps I do not create myself. I would expect the maps in PotA to be at the standard/preferred FG resolution of 50 pixels per square. I don't know if that's what you are looking for or not (I don't have STK or CoS).

If someone doesn't swing by with an answer as to what resolution the maps are at I can fire up FG and check or we can do a session and I can share some of the maps with you so you can judge for yourself (but not sure when this weekend, will be pretty busy).

[Zacchaeus]

This question comes up every so often.

You don't say whether your concern is the quality of the original artwork or whether your problem is with the maps as presented in FG. In FG images are kept to less that 2048x2048 and less than 1Mb in size wherever possible. This is so that there are less issues memory wise client side and downloading takes less time. The maps in CoS were generally quite small resolution wise so it was possible to include them at a slightly higher quality. On the other hand SKT maps are massive so the quality had to be reduced in order to keep the maps at a reasonable size. PotA also has large maps and in most cases they actually exceed the normal limits as noted above. In fact I had to cut up some of those maps not all that long ago because they were too big and causing some users issues.

Having said that all of the maps across all of the modules are perfectly good for VTT play in my view. So the bottom line is that your question is subjective and my view of whether the PotA maps are good or bad isn't really going to help you decide.

[cyphus5]

You don't say whether your concern is the quality of the original artwork or whether your problem is with the maps as presented in FG.


No, the maps in the physical book look great, it's just that the FG battle map look like they've just been essentially blown up from a small print. Maybe I'm wrong, but they seem inferior to the CoS ones.



In FG images are kept to less that 2048x2048 and less than 1Mb in size wherever possible. This is so that there are less issues memory wise client side and downloading takes less time.


Fair enough, if that's your goal. I've got maps from Heroic Maps and other makers, shrunk them down to small size and still they look great for battle maps in FG.



Having said that all of the maps across all of the modules are perfectly good for VTT play in my view. So the bottom line is that your question is subjective and my view of whether the PotA maps are good or bad isn't really going to help you decide.

Alright. Thanks for your input.

[cyphus5]

I didn't have a concern with the PotA maps. Though I admit I don't have much in the way of expectations for maps I do not create myself. I would expect the maps in PotA to be at the standard/preferred FG resolution of 50 pixels per square. I don't know if that's what you are looking for or not (I don't have STK or CoS).


I very much doubt they are 50 pixels per square in SKT, or if they are the image has been bloated to meet that. They're an eye sore. Thank you for your input. I think I'm better off getting the size and quality I want by buying the maps directly from Mike Schley, seeing as I mostly just want the maps.

[Myrdin Potter]

The issue you will run into is memory limits for the FG client. If they have too many big maps open/being shared to them, yiu risk crashing their client.

My players thought the PoTA maps were gorgeous.

[Zacchaeus]

I very much doubt they are 50 pixels per square in SKT, or if they are the image has been bloated to meet that. They're an eye sore. Thank you for your input. I think I'm better off getting the size and quality I want by buying the maps directly from Mike Schley, seeing as I mostly just want the maps.

Many of the maps in SKT were scaled to 10 feet per square given that there were a lot of Giants about. Most of the outdoor maps were 50' feet per square. So exporting those to allow for the 50px grid did entail a loss of quality. Otherwise the maps would have been too big.

More discussion here (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?34683-Storm-King-s-Thunder-Low-Quality-Maps).

[lostsanityreturned]

PotA has badly compressed maps yes.

They are all low quality for their resolution and size, sadly. I don't remeber if they were as bad as the SKT maps or not though.

[Myrdin Potter]

As I said, my group just finished the adventure and we thought the maps were very nice and a lot better than what you see in the books.

The hi-red files available directly from the cartographer are better, and you can exceed the normal limits if you are good about closing other shared images and stopping the sharing. If your DM has a decent internet connection (I do from home), you also do not need as much compression.

My group generally said “wow” to the maps, so it is all a matter of taste. If you are playing on a 4K screen I am sure they look different than on my HD screen as well.

[Trenloe]

PotA has badly compressed maps yes.

They are all low quality for their resolution and size, sadly. I don't remeber if they were as bad as the SKT maps or not though.
I think saying "all" here isn't accurate. I have just looked through a bunch of maps for PotA and a lot of them look really good.

As has been discussed - some of the original maps have 10 or 20 foot square grids on them. When being converted to 50 pixels per 5 foot square the quality is often impacted because the original digital map file as provided by WotC simply doesn't have the details for zooming in to that level, or if the original detail was there the map needs to be modified to fit within the current FG 32-bit architecture size recommendations.

@cyphus5 - from your posts it appears you're more interested in the maps than the whole product. In that case, going to the artist direct is probably your best bet. Just be aware of the 2048x2048 image resolution recommendation for Fantasy Grounds (if you are using the maps in Fantasy Grounds) - you can get away with one or two maps a little bit bigger, but the player side can easily experience memory issues with just a couple of big maps, as players will usually have a number of library modules open that already will be taking up a fair chunk of memory.

[lostsanityreturned]

When I said they were badly compressed I mean they look like files that are compressed to be two thirds to half the quality of their actual size. This offers no benefit to network connections.

Your tollerance for these may be what it is, but screen resolution differences don't alter the fact that compression artifacts are compression artifacts.
The OP was interested in opinions on this as their tollerances have meant that they didn't like the results they saw in SKT as much as their experiences with CoS.

Functional, but far from clean.

[Trenloe]

This offers no benefit to network connections.
With FG image compression has a big benefit during the sharing process. Files close to and above 1MB in size, when shared through FG, start to seriously slow down the old, inefficient network libraries currently used in FG. Resulting in significant time to share maps through to the players and a slowdown of FG on the GM side during the sharing process. Some of the sharing process is improved a bit if the GM runs on a capable computer with a fast internet connection. But, for many people, this is not always possible...

The two recommendations regarding images/maps (1MB or less in file size and maximum 2048x2048 resolution) are given for a reason. FG, in it's current architecture, struggles with files outside of these recommendations - significant sharing impact for file size and excessive memory use for image resolution.


Your tollerance for these may be what it is...
Fair enough, it looks like we do indeed have different expectations.

Like I said, some of the maps are far from great - due to the various limiting factors of the original file as provided by WotC and the above mentioned requirements. Looking at the screenshots here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/store/product.php?id=WOTC5EPOTA "most" of those maps look pretty good to me for online FG gaming.

[Temmpest]

I very much doubt they are 50 pixels per square in SKT, or if they are the image has been bloated to meet that. They're an eye sore. Thank you for your input. I think I'm better off getting the size and quality I want by buying the maps directly from Mike Schley, seeing as I mostly just want the maps.

So, are the maps on Mike's wesbite better quality than the one provided in the FG SKT module?

[ddavison]

We shoot for a high quality export to JPG. That is 60% quality setting in Photoshop. This normally gets a good display for battlemaps with a reasonably small file size. The issue comes up with large scale maps. Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Rise of Tiamat and Storm King's Thunder are the ones I'm most familiar with which have problems. FG players and DMs expect to use these maps as battlemaps with a 5' per square grid. Maps that use 10' per square, 20' per square or 50' per square lose a lot of quality converting to 5' per square. When they have the grid lines on the maps already, the grid lines tend to look really blocky when you multiply them by 2, 4 or 10.

[Trenloe]

So, are the maps on Mike's wesbite better quality than the one provided in the FG SKT module?
Yes - because they are bigger resolution and file size (less compression). Be aware that if you use these maps in FG you *will* have to reduce the resolution and file size to avoid memory issues in FG or too long sharing time and slowdown on the GM side.

[Temmpest]

Yep, I see what you guys mean. Some of those maps are for huge areas. Thanks for the info.

[Myrdin Potter]

I can only say, again, that my group ran through all of PoTA and SKT (I mashed the two together) and there were only a couple of maps in SKT that did not look great. Remember, not everyone is using a 4K monitor.

The worst map (in my opinion) was the grandfather tree in SKT and it looks like crap in the printed book as well.

I know from forum discussions that Smiteworks gets the files used to publish the books, and does not often get the source and hi-res files from the artists. Where they can get them, they do, and maps are often upgraded after the initial release when they can. The WoTC maps as published have had issues. The original PoTA map of the valley had the wrong scale and wrong encounter site placement.

I also convert modules from source material and if there is no map without a grid, it is really hard to get everything to line up and look great.

So everything is subjective, but at normal screen resolution and use, I find the maps quite functional. If anything, the pixel size limit simulates the issues you have with actual table size when you play with pencil and paper instead of virtually.

[VI66]

When I open up The Lost Mines, some of the maps are so small I can't even see them. When I resize (zoom in) they are so blurry I still can barely see them and that my friends, is discouraging at best. The player version maps/battle maps are better for the most part. I hope this situation is addressed with the Unity engine 64 bit set-up.

[Moon Wizard]

The GM maps are only for GM to reference room numbers, secrets, etc. The player maps are higher resolution, and meant to be used with players and their tokens.

None of this information is different in FGU. The module content is the same in both. (Except for the possible inclusion of LOS blocker information.)

Regards,
JPG

[VI66]

Groovy thanks. Just getting started once again as I've been away awhile so, must relearn everything which wasn't much to begin with.