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Wow. So... the 4E_JPG quick start is 32:20. I kept redoing the different sections, trying to trim it down, but I just couldn't get it any faster. I covered the options, character sheet, personalities, items, and the combat/client tracker. That's just a lot of stuff!
I'm re-rendering it again, the first run was too big. I changed it to a variable bit rate to see if I can get the size down a little. It will be uploaded tonight, though.
I personally don't mind if it's a long vid... :) Thanks again for all your work! You do us all a huge service with your efforts!
It wasn't the length that was worrying me as much as the size. It was rendering at 67 MB! I noticed that I accidentally rendered it at a constant bit rate instead of variable. Fixed that and rerendered, just finished uploading it, only 29.1 MB now!
Enjoy!
I'm taking a break for a week before I do any revisions. I want to cover working with masking in the quick start, and add a caption to clicking the speech bubble to assume a personality as an identity in chat.
There's some other tweaks I want to make, but I need to rest a little before doing that.
Great tutorial, as always.
I could tell that you were trying to be quick about it, lol... fast talker you are...
Wow, Xorn, thanks! As a newbiw to FGII, I must say, these were very useful and well made. I wish I had found them earlier!
Xorne, since I think you started these tutorials because I was rocking out so hard, I appreciate it. I've reviewed them all now, and they are very beneficial. As I get ready to run my first adventure, I am making my players watch your Quick Start, as it is a really good intro.
Thanks for your hard work.
--Dale--
Glad everyone enjoyed them, I had fun making them. 2.1 GB of traffic today. Wow. :)
Just curious, do you do anything special to enhance the image quality? The overall map of the keep at actual size has a grid width of around 10 for me, and obviously you lose resolution as you scale up. Any tips, Griogre, or do you just accept the loss of resolution? I like the idea, but the details of the map are lost for me...Quote:
Originally Posted by Griogre
I have the non electronic version of KotS. For FG I would normally suggest getting a PDF but I am expecting to run the scenario in a face to face game and don't like the distraction of a laptop in those type of games and I didn’t want to pay for print outs of the poster maps.
Thus my KotS level maps are scans. You can control the size and number of pixels of map scans by setting the dpi of the scan. Each "dot" becomes a pixel on the screen. I scanned my level maps in at 200 dpi which gave me 19-21 pixel squares. These are fine for me because I use portrait style tokens scaled so 32 pixels is a five foot square. I have found that 5 foot squares of about 2/3rds to 1/2 of your medium size tokens give a pretty good appearance to file size trade off.
Once I scanned the map I cropped it and took a look at its file size. My goal is a file size of less than a meg, uncompressed. The scan after cropping was abut 6.9 megs uncompressed and the scan is about a 5.5 meg meg png. This was at 16 bit color depth. I took the easy color reduction down to 8 bits from 16 bit color which usually is pretty unnoticeable. Doing that about halved the size of the file.
Once I did that I had to decide if I was going to stay with a color map or not. You can't really take a color map to 4 bit color and have it look nice. You can take a grayscale map to 4 bit color and have it look nice though. I was undecided on color or not so I ended up trying both.
For the non color map, I sepiaed it which gives it a parchment tanish "look" then resized the map down a bit and took it to 4 bit color. The png file came in a 492K and the non compressed file size is 557K and the graphic is 1108x1026 with a final square size of 17 which is acceptable to me with a 32 pixel medium scale. The map is a tiny bit blurry but the file size is very good considering what I started with.
I went back and then tried a color map. There is no way I can have the map look decent at less than 8 bit color dept (256 colors) but it does look good there and still is half the size of the 16 bit map. I reduce the map so I have 17 pixel squares and end up with 1105x966 map with a 789K png file that is 1.02 megs uncompressed. That's a hair more than I wanted but pretty close so I ended up using the color map and just made a mental note to pre-load it.
If I had to do it again I probably would have scanned at 300 dpi to try to get rid of the slight blurriness.
And now you know more than you ever wanted. :)
I made my own KotS PDF actually, I have the printed version. I scanned that full-size map at 600 DPI the first time through, then after restarting my computer (because it ran out of memory) I rescanned it at 450 DPI. Turned out really well, actually, though in the end I opted to do battlemaps.