Konnichiwa,

I'am sorry that you had to read the same story again, I hope I didn't insult you?

Making sketches of any size and cropping that won't work very well. Especially water will make problems here. I said sketch, but it should be precise here and there, we don't want units inside water.

That's why there should be 3 different templates with a grid. One for each mapsize.
A small map has a grid of 20*20 tiles, a big map (I haven't counted them yet :-) 31*31 tiles.
If scrolling is a problem then you would make one tile 15 pixels width (15*31=465 pixels). That seems acceptable for most monitor settings (800*600 pixels).

A small map of 20*20 tiles has about 40,000*40,000 coordinates. Thus 1 pixel in the drawing corresponds to 40,000/20/15 = 133 coordinates. That is a reasonable resolution (It can be made a bit better as every map has a redzone perimeter of 2 tiles where units shouldn't be placed, the redzone doesn't need to be displayed in the tool, thus a small map is only 16*16 tiles. If you use say 18*18 pixels per tile a big map sketch will be a square of 27*18=486 pixels).

But you might want to place 4 units on 1 tile of 15*15 pixels. Unless you can create 'icons' of some 4*4 pixels and make a zoomfunction to enlarge one tile to make the exact positioning of a uniticon more clear (one tile could fill the entire window), it will become quite tedious to create a battle.

A powerful tool would allow the placement of some 10 units on 1 tile (also 1 men units can be used!)

I don't know wether it is possible to make, but perhaps it's possible to use a small map with 15*15 pixel tiles for the overview and use a 200*200 pixel per tile for the zoom map, the user can see either all tiles unzoomed or 1 tile zoomed). One zoomfunction and two maps.

An alternative might be a popupbox where the user can optionally enter an exact coordinate (within the range of that (sub)tile!) for a placed unit which overrides the pixelcoordinate, thus the map will become an approxiamation of what one will get. This will already be a major improvement over editing in wordpad.

I've made some maps by first drawing a sketch on a gridpaper (20*20 tiles of 1*1 cm). By counting tiles while in the mapeditor you can make a map that 'exactely' resembles the sketch. In the case of water and strategic positiong of units on hills this is very important.

Thank you very much for the good work.

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Ja mata
Toda MizuTosaInu
Daimyo Takiyama Shi
http://www.takiyama.cjb.net

[This message has been edited by TosaInu (edited 10-03-2001).]