Different Colored Pins

[JustinThomason]

+1 for the legend.

I'm about to start an overland sandbox campaign and having some differentiation in the tags will be very important to make the map easier to read.

I would also like to second the idea of having a small image be a possibility in the mouse-over information. That, combined with colors to differentiate pins, would make my day. That way a pin colored as a "settlement" could have a different icon if it was a village, a town, a city, or even a trading post.

As long as you have an easily accessible Legend, I don't think confusion will be much of an issue. Also, if you tied the Legend entries to the topic types, (like "settlement" or "adventure area") I would think it would be possible to have the colors automatically assigned when you connected a pin to an existing topic. Of course, that's my non-coder, design minded self talking - I obviously have no idea about the technical hurdles involved in any of this.

[rob]

Please realize that having all this stuff be fully configurable and adaptable increases the amount of work many-fold, sometimes by an entire order of magnitude. So the more customizable this stuff becomes, the longer it will take to implement, which means the more competition this feature will have from everything else on the todo list. Tasks that can be done in a couple days are vastly more likely to get tackled during small windows of opportunity compared to tasks that will be measured in weeks. That's something critical to keep in mind here, so it's most likely that features like some of you are requesting will be implemented in small increments.

There's another important thing to keep in mind for all of you folks who want a wide range of colors to "color-code" an array of purposes on a single map. That sounds great in concept, but it's going to run into some nasty problems on a practical level. And those problems have NOTHING to do with technical hurdles. When we picked the map pin colors, we tried dozens of different colors. There were THREE that we found were generically good against virtually all the diverse assortment of maps that users will be employing. All the other colors we tried ran into serious problems with one type of map or another, as the pin color was nearly the same as the underlying map. For example, we wanted to use green to indicate something is revealed (for consistency), but green gets washed out against many overland maps. Blue sounded like it would work well, but it virtually disappears against water areas. The list goes on.

So even if we do make it possible to have an entire rainbow of colors for pins, the basic nature of most maps will preclude the use of many of those colors as pins. Most maps will only reasonably allow for a handful of pin colors to be used (unless all your maps are black-and-white), since the rest won't yield enough contrast to be good choices. And there will be some maps that will reduce that number down to only two or three good options.

All that being said, I'll make sure this request gets on the survey. Just don't be surprised if this feature is not quite as useful in practice as it may seem in concept. That consideration is something we're also going to have to factor into how much development time we invest, since there are numerous other features that don't have the potential baggage of this one that are vying for the same resources. It's an ugly task trying to juggle all these competing priorities against one another.

[AEIOU]

Right now, I turn the pins off as they aren't useful (to me) without some means of visual differentiation. I 've chosen to edit the original maps and add the appropriate identifiers there and in RW I add an invisible pin so I have floaty text and a link.

Colors seemed to be the easier upgrade so its been my first choice. But shapes would be even more useful (to me). Add a square, a circle and a triangle and the usefulness of the pin feature would increase dramatically.

Thinking into the future, I'd love to be able to import my own images from Campaign Cartographer or other sources to identify towns, secret doors, traps, geographic landmarks, areas of interest.... Some day....

[Bidmaron]

I am with AEIOU. Shapes would be better. Whatever we have needs a legend, however, IMO. Thanks Rob for the consideration. I too doubt this will make the first upgrade cut, but it will be nice to have eventually.

[Mandorian]

Hello i can see last on this thread was from 2013..
soo i guess your not taking this so serious but i will post it here anyway

Hello L.W And thank you for a great program.
I have a small Q: can I or when will I be able to change colors of the map pins?

Would be great to be able to have diffrnt colors on them depending on what they mark, yellow for markets and store, blue for.... Etc etc

With best regards
Mandorian.

[Rone]

Originally Posted by Mandorian

Hello i can see last on this thread was from 2013..
soo i guess your not taking this so serious but i will post it here anyway

Hello L.W And thank you for a great program.
I have a small Q: can I or when will I be able to change colors of the map pins?

Would be great to be able to have diffrnt colors on them depending on what they mark, yellow for markets and store, blue for.... Etc etc

With best regards
Mandorian.

Welcome to the forum, Mandorian!

This is a more current conversation on the subject.

http://forums.wolflair.com/showthrea...ighlight=color

[Frunk]

Realise I posted this in the wrong forum... better here:

I have been doing some big chunks of data entry, so have finally hit a bunch of "love to have" features as I worked through it.

Pin differentiation was one of them. Several suggestions:

• Colour options - but can understand the issues here in visibility
• Shape options
• Pin Text options - probably the simplest. When you define a pin you already enter data with it (or link) - just being able to include a few (1-3) letters/numbers that is shown on the pin at all times could give us some easy options to differentiate pins and match them up to a simple hand crafted text based key. This remains useful even if you decide to initiate the other options above. It also works when you convert to web, print in black and white, etc.

I will go and find some other forum threads for my other annoyances

[Syrkres]

Originally Posted by Frunk

Realise I posted this in the wrong forum... better here:

I have been doing some big chunks of data entry, so have finally hit a bunch of "love to have" features as I worked through it.

Pin differentiation was one of them. Several suggestions:

• Colour options - but can understand the issues here in visibility
• Shape options
• Pin Text options - probably the simplest. When you define a pin you already enter data with it (or link) - just being able to include a few (1-3) letters/numbers that is shown on the pin at all times could give us some easy options to differentiate pins and match them up to a simple hand crafted text based key. This remains useful even if you decide to initiate the other options above. It also works when you convert to web, print in black and white, etc.

I will go and find some other forum threads for my other annoyances

+1 to the above idea