jpg, png, Map and Picture files sizes
 

Hello,

I have a question about map and picture sizes in Realm Works.

I'm wondering if any of you reduce the file sizes on your maps and pictures to keep your Realm Works database size down, and if so, what is a decent size that retains the quality of the map or picture?

Some of the maps I work with (Mike Schley's maps specifically) are rather large in size, some being several megabytes. I'm hesitant to use them as smart image maps.

Does anyone have any experience with this?

Naleax

Absolutely

Some of mike's maps error just trying to get them in. I always save images as a *. Jpg and if it errors I reside the image in paintshop to meet the size requirements suggested by Realm Works.

I was wondering this myself. Thanks for posting!

For large maps, you may want to downsize them considerably so they load quickly and link the original as an external file. This gives the best of both worlds as you can view it at a reasonable resolution at a glance or easily navigate to the full-sized version if you want to be able to zoom in without it blurring.

Thanks for the advice.

I've gathered that jpg format is the way to go due to the greater compression while maintaining quality.

I ran a little experiment with gimp. I took a 14 megabyte png map file and exported it as a jpg file while reducing the quality in 10% increments. My goal was to see what the quality looked like at each increment. I was trying to get the 14 megabyte file under 1 megabyte while maintain a suitable quality. Based off the results I think I'll convert them to jpg and then use gimp to reduce them in size by 50%.

This works well for reference maps, but for a battle map not so much as the map starts to pixelate. Anyone have experience with Battle map images? I'd like to import battle maps for use in player view and fog of war, but this seems like it might bloat the database.

Naleax

I don't use Realm Works for battlemaps. Unfortunately I don't feel it's quite there yet as a VTT. That and I have a laptop, player visible screen and projector all hooked up. RW only supports displaying information on 2 of those screens.

I personally use MapTools. I find it much more efficient when managing the fog.

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Lqs3QlNZK...%2B6szpWy4.jpg

That's a lot of diapers.

@Exmortis: You'd be shocked at how quickly nascent gamers can blow through them on a diet of pureed peas and pears. Blueberries are kinda fun the first few times.

Looks like a weekend supply from my experience. The absolute last thing you ever want is to be out at 2 AM.

Ah, they are for babies. I thought you might just be a very scary DM.