NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="seanpecor" data-source="post: 4987695" data-attributes="member: 86145">For the photos, I just used some existing scanned maps from some published D&D modules. I'm not actually the DM for our group, but luckily our DM is ready and willing to collaborate on a sensible process to work with maps during game play.For basic display of the maps during game play, I reviewed all of the virtual tabletop programs out there and I decided that none of them will work for an analog mini - digital map hybrid. They really want to wrest more control out of your hands at the expense of simplicity (in my opinion). So the process right now is this:Using The Gimp (free, open source graphics program), load up a scanned map. This is the DM map. Duplicate the map image (Ctrl-D). This becomes the player map. Add a new layer to the new duplicate, and specify a black foreground color when asked. The map disappears behind the black "fog of war". Move the blacked out player map over to the projection "monitor" and full-screen it (F11). Switch to the Eraser tool and pick a huge brush (large enough to erase at least 1 square). Now wherever you hover the cursor on the player map you see the big brush tool, and when you click and hold down the mouse button you can erase the fog of war. It's not a perfect solution though. I'm a software and web applications developer, so I'm going to write a web-based tool that does JUST a DM and Player window and the fog of war, and nothing else. I'm going to code it so you can upload a map, then pick a bounding rectangle to teach the program how big a 1x1 square is. Then it will create a DM window and a Player window view of the same map. The DM can first erase the fog of war on his laptop window (which is seen as 50% transparent so he/she can see everything) and click an UPDATE button to refresh the Player window. It will also handle scrolling the viewable area of the Player window, etc. I'll write it next week and post it on my web site. Sean</blockquote>

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