An alternative to pins on maps

[Grey Mage]

Some maps (usually urban ones, I should think) will have many many pins as the details of the city are fleshed out and various businesses and NPC locations are entered.

As an alternative might it be possible to just have a small colored dot similar to what Denis did here with his City of Greyhawk map?

Link to his map: http://melkot.com/locations/cogh/cogh.html

The ability to just see the dot and hover it would be helpful.

Perhaps pins versus dots could be selected as a preference?

[Maidhc O Casain]

I can definitely see advantages here. I love pretty maps, and could see city maps especially being so covered with pins over time that you couldn't see the art . . .

[AEIOU]

Circles, squares, triangles, donuts.... Even icons for cities, towers, trees, mountains, hills.... Make the whole image or icon green if revealed.

Hover text is essential but it would be nice to toggles some text as always on.

[AEIOU]

Sorry for second post but sometimes a picture is worth a bazillion words. Here's a map that I just uploaded to the Realm Works community over on G+. If you can tell me which pins are towns, forests, mountains and places of interest, you've played too much in this setting....

https://plus.google.com/104499183668...ts/Z3k9Dk1NFAJ

The little green "player knowledge" dots are nice, but they can easily get lost. I can't even imagine trying to do a city like Magnimar or whatever where I want to identify a LOT of locations.

[Joe]

We'll definitely be taking a look at alternate icon styles/modes/preferences for map pins. Nothing's certain, but I'm imagining the next step using the category icons for the associated content instead of the pin icon. This at least would allow you to differentiate communities from regions, generic locations, encounters, quests, etc.

You may also want to try out using maps at different levels of detail with pins that link to more detailed maps. Try shrinking your full map in a paint program by 50% and importing it. Pin only it's various regions and maybe some key cities. Then crop your image at 100% size around a region. Add all the more detailed pins to the closer zoomed region map. Then just associate the region topic (with the more detailed map) to the region pin on the more zoomed out world/area map. Rinse and repeat as needed. Boom, now you have a series of hierarchical maps that you can drill down into to get more detail, or back up to get a broader and less cluttered overview. It's not exactly Google Maps but it will get you places.

I'll be doing some kind of video tutorial on this in the future.

[Silveras]

Category icons are a nice approach.. also, if all of them can be toggled based on the category (Show Communities; Hide Communities), that would be a nice add-on to that.

[AEIOU]

"Try shrinking your full map in a paint program by 50% and importing it. Pin only it's various regions and maybe some key cities."

Excellent approach.

This would be much more doable if we could draw outlines around the regions to clearly delineate them. Rob's already said it's in the works. But your suggestion would benefit from that additional step which is likely much more difficult to implement.

One reason to not go the region route is that the full-world view with a bazillion pins allows us to look on the lower righthand side for that esoteric place you know is somewhere but have no clue where to begin.

I simultaneously want an overview map with everything including regional borders; and I want regional maps that are more manageable and just as detailed.... And a pony....

[Joe]

Good suggestion @Silveras. I'll keep it in mind.

@AEIOU(and sometimes Y? ) If you're feeling artsy, in the meantime you could always add some semitransparent blobs with photoshop (or Paint .NET) to your high level maps to make the areas more clear. This of course assumes the borders and political boundaries don't change too often, but even it they do, RW lets you change the underlying image without disturbing the pins and reveal mask. It's more work than if we handled regional boundaries in RW ourselves, but it will get you by until we do.

[Dakadin]

Originally Posted by AEIOU

One reason to not go the region route is that the full-world view with a bazillion pins allows us to look on the lower righthand side for that esoteric place you know is somewhere but have no clue where to begin.

I simultaneously want an overview map with everything including regional borders; and I want regional maps that are more manageable and just as detailed.... And a pony....

One nice thing about going the regional route is it will be easier to track down that esoteric place if you know the name of it. Just find it in the story/world almanac. Then you should be able to track down the region map it is attach to using the content links list.

[AEIOU]

Stop talking sense, Joe. Doing stuff outside of RW? It's kinda funny but I'm so focused on trying to figure out how to do EVERYTHING in RW that I've tuned common sense out.

Add category icons and I'll skip the pony request.