Updating a Map

[goldensword52]

Hi everyone, I'm having some trouble with the smart image functionality that I'm hoping you can help me with. I have a smart image I used for a map of a city, and I have several pins associated with the map. The question is, is there any way to change the original image, while still keeping all of the pins in their relative positions?

For example, say the city suffers a fire, and half of it gets destroyed. I would like to be able to change the map image itself to show the fire damage, while still keeping the pins in place for the rest of the city. Is this possible to do with realm works?

Thanks in advance.

[Silveras]

If I recall correctly, a previous answer to the same question said that you should be able to replace the image with another of the same dimensions, and the pins would remain in place. You may want to experiment with a "safe" image to get a feel for it.

[Pollution]

I did this yesterday.

I ended up clearing my pins too, but that's because I took a higher resolution picture of Sandpoint than the one I started with.

Here's what happened:

Original Pic had 50+ pins on it.
The image was kinda basic (the one from the map folio). I wanted something more detailed with street names, districts, etc....
I cleared image. Everything vanished.
I put in the new image. Pins were back....in the wrong places now, but they were back (BTW, it seems that the pins location come from the bottom right as their starting place. I had a ton on on the lower right side, but nothing on the top left)

If you had a 1500x1500 image, and then replaced it with another one of the same size, the pins will be correctly placed (as long as the image is the same, just prettier or in color or whatever).

So, for you, edit your image that you used. Add the fire damage via paint or whatever.

Clear image
Upload image
Perfection.

[goldensword52]

Cool, thanks for the advice everyone.

[Joe]

Yes unfortunately this only works well for images that are the same size. We could (in theory) make it "work" for different sizes as well, but it would only work well for images with the same Aspect Ratio. Even then, it would depend on the image having the actual terrain features in the same places relative to the bounds of the image. If you have one map image with a fancy, artsy border and a second map image without it, this still wouldn't work.

Smart Images are in a reasonably good place right now, so they will likely not change much in the near-term. However, Smart Images are a flagship feature of Realm Works, so I fully expect that they will become more powerful over time. At some point in the future we may add some kind of layering support. This could allow you to have multiple versions of the image you can switch between for anything from destroyed towns to time travel.

[Bidmaron]

Joe, I still say you could make it work and do everything by just asking the user to click two points any time a new image is loaded. By knowing the distance between the two points relative to the same points on the old image, you could handle different resolutions and different aspect ratios. It would just work (unless the images were logarithmically scaled or if they were such small scale that you get into spherical distortions due to mercator or other image projections)

[Sarai]

I'm using RW to organise my information for a book I'm writing. To help organise everything in a very visual way, I create relationship maps (on another software) and upload them onto RW as smart maps. Then I set one pin for each person. That way, I can go to a family topic, identify all its members, servants, allies and so on at a glance and quickly click on one pin to get more details on a given individual.

The other day, I needed to update one of those pictures, adding a couple more individuals. So I opened my other software, added them in... and was forced to move several other individuals around in order to fit the new ones (I had 30+ people there, it sometimes gets difficult to have everything packed nicely).

Nevertheless, when I replaced the old map with the new one, I was very pleased to see that all I had to do was move pins around to get them back over the correct person.