Suggestion: Background layer

Suggestion:  Repeat one tile for the entirety of the map, below the "map" layer, then treat it as a single image, instead of X tiles I made a generic town where most of my campaign takes place, and it looks pretty horrid.  After playing with the tools, and some tile sets a bit, I rebuilt it with much better tiles.  The only problem was the grass in the background.  The map is something like 46*96 tiles, and unless I enlarged the tile to cover most of it (leaving me with 20ft high blades of grass) I had to tile the whole thing thing piece by piece.  While it's not that big of a deal...I now have about 70 tiles placed just for the background, not including buildings, trees, roads, and general decor.  I think it would be great if that could be minimized by repeating one tile automatically.

That may not be the best solution. I offer an alternative: users are given the ability to make a rectangle of tile of an arbitrary size?

Not sure if your suggestion is to resize the tile to match the background, which if I did, would enlarge everything in the tile itself, making it feel like a "Honey I shrunk the kids" effect.  Alternatively, I could tile them manually in Photoshop to fit the size I need, which would have given a more elegant look in hind sight...but I still feel the less I have to rely on 3rd party to get my campaign running, the better.

I think using a 3rd party program goes with the design idea of what roll20 is suppose to be. Roll20 was just designed and built to replace your table for you to play your games online. Plain and simple - it is to be a table for online games, the devs built certain functions to help us but some things should be left separate like map making. Tiles were designed to be used like the following or not taking one tile and making a complete map. That is why there are programs like photoshop and gimp out there. Just tossing my pennies into the mix here.

I understand what you mean there Metroknight, and using the pics you provided as an example, the only thing I'm putting out there as a suggestion is that the brown tiled surface you've got there, is green instead...and using the wonders of computers, just a single repeated grass tile, or maybe a stone tile for a castle.  Nothing so complex as the walls, doors, and ramps...that I think Roll20 does a wonderful job at providing the tools to bring in, 3rd party or otherwise.

I've built maps like you talk about a couple times. One method you could do if you want to use a single grass token, you could do the following. step 1 : import your tile token. (leave it in token layer) step 2: copy and paste it. (do this till you have 4x4 set of tiles) step 3: select them all (click and drag across all the tokens) and copy step 4: repeat step 2 till you have 8x8 map then repeat step 3 step 5 : build you map quickly this manner to whatever size you want. step 6: select all of them then move them back to the map layer I did this to toss some maps together when I couldn't find something on google that I like or that would work. Since then I discovered what gimp can do and haven't looked back.

What Metroknight suggests is also essentially the same process you'd use for an image program to make a tile background one image as well. The real trick would be making an image large enough to fit any map you would make of it. I however would also agree with the ability to tile a background with a background layer below a  map layer - even if you still had to tile it yourself. I've tried making that kind of map and with all the tiles, it can get annoying trying to select other tiles over that set background like river/water tiles across a bunch of grassy field tiles, then bridge section tiles and tree tiles over that. If the trees were on the token layer it's too easy for the GM to accidentally select them when moving other tokens. but I get from your image example up there, that wold normally be a problem in person, but then the ability to select map tiles should be a heck of a lot easier because manual manipulation is a lot easier than the digital manipulation we have.

I ended up just making on giant tile in photoshop, although had to keep lowering the quality until it fit under 10mb (it is a 96x64 map after all).  It works, but it would still be a huge improvement to either have it as its own layer, or even just be able to lock tokens on any layer in place somehow.  While building may fall, trees can be cut down, and rivers could even change path, its extremely rare that the ground itself needs to change in a way that I ever need to manipulate it again.  And if I do, there's a good chance it'd be better to just start from scratch anyway 

did you get the tile off the web? If so then drop me a link and let me see if I can play with it a bit to see if I can drop the mb size down some. 96x64 is only 6720x4480. I've done things close to that size and not have that mb size

I just made a background texture that was about the size I wanted in Photoshop and just used a generic brush to fill it in.

Your comparison doesn't quite hold, Metroknight.  Macros aren't how you figure out the math at a tabletop either, but their presence is a huge boon for a lot of people using VTT's.  You don't want to purposely gimp the software just to make it exactly like a real tabletop.  I mean, there's API access and dynamic shadows, that's stuff that certainly goes above and beyond what you'd expect out of a physical tabletop and they're cool as hell. You also don't build stuff like in your photos tile by tile either, you take big sections and place them.  Big "backdrop" maps that serve merely as a backdrop aren't uncommon at all, particularly for stuff like grass, dirt, sand, or rock.  Just place your playable tiles on top and it looks cool. The feature doesn't muddy up the UI or do anything unintuitive, nor does is it advanced enough that it'd be better served in a dedicated image editor.  It simply speeds up a process common to a lot of games.  I find myself wanting the same feature, it'd make it a lot easier to make nice-looking maps on the fly, something I believe a lot of Roll20's functionality is designed around.  Tile a grass texture, randomize orientation, turn a brush into a texture and draw a road, plop down some trees, instant wilderness map.

ok

Might a suggest Pyromancers.com dungeon painter? I've been using it to build my current campaign and it's so simple to export as an image/pdf and straight into Roll20. <a href="http://pyromancers.com/dungeon-painter-online/" rel="nofollow">http://pyromancers.com/dungeon-painter-online/</a> Even if you don't want to build a whole map from it you can build the background (eg. grass) and just import that as one giant image and build ontop of it.

I had actually looked at Pyromancers for map building before, but I never thought to try and scale it back to just use a background.&nbsp; I will give that a shot, thank you.