D&D 5E [Map Rant] Hey, Developers: Please stop coloring your seas bright sky blue

[Hussar]

I think that Primeval Thule map looks just fine.

The problem with the Thule map is in how they structured the pdf. It's murder to zoom and causes my poor computer no end of grief and lag.

I've never had this problem with any other pdf. Must be something in the layering. And I'd point out that I'm hardly the only one. There have been numerous complaints about the Thule map.

 

[Jester David]

The Thule map does look a little Textbooky to me too...

 

[Rich Baker]

It's a fair cop -- we deliberately decided to mimic the old National Geographic map style for Primeval Thule. Sasquatch Dave Noonan was adamant that he didn't want to see a poster map with a few dozen tags on it -- he wanted to see the same kind of "information density" you'd get from a real-world map, and challenged me and Steve Schubert to fill that map with zillions of tags.

So, yeah, I appreciate handsomely done artistic maps. But Thule offers far more locales than many setting maps and teases the GM with evocative names. As they say: YMMV.


Rich Baker
Sasquatch Game Studio

 

[Nawara]

It's a fair cop -- we deliberately decided to mimic the old National Geographic map style for Primeval Thule. Sasquatch Dave Noonan was adamant that he didn't want to see a poster map with a few dozen tags on it -- he wanted to see the same kind of "information density" you'd get from a real-world map, and challenged me and Steve Schubert to fill that map with zillions of tags.

Thanks for the response! I didn't realize it was an intentional copy of the NatGeo house style; that's really interesting.

I'm curious, though... if you have the map built as some sort of vector-based model rather than a piece of art, how much work would go into producing a sepia-toned version? If it's something that would only take about 15-30 minutes of work or so, I'd be willing to chip in $50 towards getting it up on DriveThru.

(If it's more trouble than that, though, no worries.)

 

[DonT]

I like supersaturated colors. I don't like LIGHT blue simply because light blue can never be bold enough. I want something like this.

 

[Hussar]

It's a fair cop -- we deliberately decided to mimic the old National Geographic map style for Primeval Thule. Sasquatch Dave Noonan was adamant that he didn't want to see a poster map with a few dozen tags on it -- he wanted to see the same kind of "information density" you'd get from a real-world map, and challenged me and Steve Schubert to fill that map with zillions of tags.

So, yeah, I appreciate handsomely done artistic maps. But Thule offers far more locales than many setting maps and teases the GM with evocative names. As they say: YMMV.


Rich Baker
Sasquatch Game Studio

I do love the map. And it is certainly detailed. My only beef is that whatever was done creating the pdf causes my MacBook Air to freeze up every time I zoom in.

Any advice on how to fix this?

 

[Rich Baker]

[MENTION=29530]Nawara[/MENTION] and [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] -- I'm not strong on graphics, so I'll have to take the question of how the map file is built to our layout guy. I know there is some trickery involved because the map file is HUGE, way too big to easily host on DriveThru, so we had to cut some corners to manage the file size. Let me see what I can find out.

Rich Baker
Sasquatch Game Studio

 

[Hussar]

Cool beans. You rock [MENTION=6746624]Rich Baker[/MENTION]

 

[RCanine]

I do love the map. And it is certainly detailed. My only beef is that whatever was done creating the pdf causes my MacBook Air to freeze up every time I zoom in.

What's the format? What reading program?

If it's a PDF in the preview app, I notice that it's really bad at rendering huge images; what I think it does internally is paint pixels equal to the map size x the magnification, and stores it all in memory, then if that's more memory than can be allocated to the program, it needs to use swap memory, which is slow. In addition, if it's a vector map or has fonts embedded, your computer's going to have to do a ton of extra calculations rendering sub-pixels on the fonts.

There's not a ton of things to fix this; it sounds like it's just pushing up against the computational ability of your macbook. Some things that might help are:

* Slice the file into smaller images
* Flatten the file in a JPG, or JPEG 2000 if you're short on disk space and don't care about interoperability

The real solution is to do something like what Google Maps does, and slice the information into smaller tiles and dynamically display what you need to at a given time, but that's more work than most people can put in.

 

[Hussar]

The file is in pdf format and i'm just reading it with Reader (or Adobe Reader on my Windows machine).

Yeah, I've converted it to a jpeg, but, then you tend to lose a lot of detail as you zoom in and it makes the labels rather hard to read. I think I'm going to import the image into Gimp, redraw a lot of it, relabel it at a readable scale, and just make slice maps for the players. It's not like they really need the entire world map very often. Regional maps work well enough. And, the nice thing is the scale of the map is small enough that you can make slice maps that cover large areas with fairly reasonable file sizes. A, say, 2000 pixel square map will cover quite a bit at pretty decent resolution on a world map that is only a few thousand miles across. It's not like Thule is Forgotten Realms sized or anything like that. It's, at a guess, about the size of the continental United States, probably a fair bit smaller.