Mapping and scale...

I recently purchased nine city tilesets from Gabriel Pickard (these are beautiful, by the way- very impressed with the overall quality).  Each set describes the size of the tiles.  For example, my Medium City 1 tiles are 20 X 20 square. I'm in the process of building a huge, sprawling cityscape for an urban sword and sorcery campaign, but am having trouble figuring out scale.  Are the maps meant to scale at 5' per square?  Meaning that the maps would cover 100 ft. by 100 ft.?  Or is it 10 ft. square?  Or what? Also, for those of you that use them, how many of these do you find you can place on a single page without causing performance issues for you and your players?  If you make large urban maps, how do you structure and organize the different areas by page?  Having never tackled a mapping project of this scope before, I'm eager for any advice you can offer. Thanks  in advance for your help and advice.  :-)

Gabriel the artist will probably see this and come around to answer himself. I use a lot of his maps as tiles and make larger areas like you're describing, although I've done mostly wilderness (forest, snow field, ocean), and some dungeon and fortress area maps (Roll20 pages), have not done an urban outdoor (city) with Gabriel's maps used as tiles yet. The closest I've come to that was planting a single Inn & stable, or a bandit camp, alongside a larger wilderness/swamp map. I think that the maps are meant to scale at 5' per square, the number of squares Gabriel tells in the descriptions or file names. In many cases this can be adjusted according to GM's preference, without a major issue (depending how particular and visually critical your players & your game needs to be). To start with the scale they are designed I would set grid to 5 feet per unit, set number of units to what the tile artist specified. But then you can manually adjust it a bit larger or smaller, and often find the artwork is equally convincing. My trick is to use the Roll20 Ruler (measuring tool) after you nudge your map to the size you think you want. &nbsp;Look for something you know like a table, or a fire pit, or a tent, or a room, on the map. Measure it with the ruler tool. &nbsp;If you think "Yeah that table can be 10 feet, whatever, that's cool" then stick with it. &nbsp;If everything is too small or too large you can bump it back. Again I think Gabriel will confirm they are made for 5-feet per unit, but as a practical matter I've certainly found that you can nudge it up or down quite a bit and still get a good appearance with a playable, convincing scale. &nbsp;My guess is this nudging works more smoothly on wilderness than urban buildings. It's not a problem when the diameter of a tree appears as 5' or 10' or 15' or 20'. On an urban layout you might nudge less, but still I've found that you can stretch or compress a Tavern map and still get believable, measurable, playable spaces. Finally, your last question, the most interesting. I regularly make area maps of 180x220 units, covered with encounter maps used as tiles, and have success with this size, and slight performance hits when it's really filled up with tons of tokens on top.&nbsp;There are very many factors at play in performance loading of your Roll20 map pages. Something awesome, Roll20 has a good way of only loading the parts that are showing to the players, at the zoom they are loaded at. &nbsp;If you are zoomed out it does not load "original size" but loads a smaller thumbnail appropriate for that view. If you are zoomed in, it only needs to load the section that you are zoomed to look at. This is a big performance feature that allows larger pages on here than previously possible. This awesome feature should (and seems to) really help with allowing wider-taller page areas that are scrolled-across and only viewed one quadrant at a time, in other words pages with a lot of maps stitched together. There can be exceptions, many other factors add weight to the pageload such as number of Tokens on the page, and whether you use Dynamic light or not. Besides all these factors of what GM puts on the Page, the largest factor by-far is if any of your players has an old computer or underpowered. &nbsp;You can have a very big page that loads fine for everyone except the one player with the lowest computer power. With all this in mind, I have had success adding 6 to 12 of Gabriel's maps onto 1 Roll20 page, and, it didn't cause performance problems until later when we had 100's of tokens on top, plus dynamic lighting, plus fog of war, plus API running, plus Jukebox running sounds, and even then it really only bogged down on the 2 players with the lowest computers in the group (with some but tolerable slowdowns seen on newer computers). Also it bogged down at other times but we discovered it was Roll20 status having hiccups for everyone on those days, so it was not because of our map size like we suspected. The one (undocumented?) issue I've personally had with large maps is when I placed or stretched a single map graphic that was over 5500x5500 pixels, this was not a Gabriel map but my own creation. &nbsp;I tried 7000x7000 and 12000x12000, they did not work, and failed repeatedly, loading as black box at different zoom levels. Not sure if this bug was on my end or what, I didn't resolve it, but my testing showed that the maps were happy at 5000x5000. I believe you'll find that the professional Marketplace maps are rarely meant for larger than 5500x5500, that seems to be about the max size of a single graphic that I have seen from Marketplace. &nbsp;But Jason, I've found that I could place 6 to 12 maps of that pixel size, side by side on a single Page, and it works for my group, and I haven't tested to see if we can go larger still. &nbsp;When talking pixels remember that a Unit in Roll20 is 70 pixels at 100% zoom, regardless of your scale being 5' or 10' or other. &nbsp;You can do all the scaling math with this, if you want to know how many pixels in a 200x200 (Units) Page, and how many 5000x5000 (pixels) map tiles you would put there to fill it up. Remember to add more resolution (pixel density) if you want the map to look equally good if players zoom in to 150% or even 200% (the max zoom). If you want to look "perfect" at 200% zoom you want around 140x140 pixels per unit. These numbers are needed if you download all the map tiles into Photoshop or GIMP (external graphic editor) and then use their SLICE tool to break your mega-map up into tiles to upload/place in Roll20. Read Optimizing roll20 wiki docs for more info on that, <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Optimizing_Roll20_Performa" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Optimizing_Roll20_Performa</a>... How many of Gabriel's maps are you thinking about putting on one page? Eager to hear the dimensions of the page you create, and your results.

Wow, that's a very thorough and detailed reply, Gold. &nbsp;Thanks for taking the time. As far as the map(s) are concerned, I'm not sure. &nbsp;I happen to have an older computer so it may not handle very many tiles on a single page. &nbsp;I built this large area map with overview tiles from the sets, that basically just shows the walls, streets and rooftops (sorry for the blurriness- I just used cliptool to cut and paste the image): &nbsp; I think there are something like 120 tiles on this page, though as they are overview tiles probably are lower resolution quality and not so taxing on the computer as an actual play map would be. &nbsp;I have one 20x20 tile highlighted in red so you can visualize the size of the thing. The thing is, many of the buildings on the maps multiple stories- so as many as 4 stories with a basement, which can add up to a lot of tiles (I want to stack them on the map layer in order, then rotate them to the back as players explore the buildings, going from one level to another).

Ok, I have a pretty good idea of the size from what you said and illustrated. Likely the top advice is going to be "Split that up into ___ Pages". What would you think about doing your city in, say.. 9 pages? ("Districts" of the city). In this scheme, each Page would be about 12 of the 20x20 tiles, plus some extra grass borders. &nbsp;I'm not saying that Roll20 is limited to this (also not guaranteeing that computers can swallow it), but I would say it would be about the largest that I have made if you divide that city into 9 pages, and zoom it to 5' per unit scale. In other words your city is possibly around 9x larger than the largest wilderness map I've tried so far myself, which didn't need layers for indoor spaces. &nbsp;By the way in my games it took my players weeks-and-weeks to play their way across 1 of our mega-map pages, but of course different games can cover larger territory at a quicker pace. Stacking & rotating layers is possible but can be tricky, as a practical matter, by the way. You only have "Send to Front" and "Send to Back" in Roll20, not a true layer stack, and these commands only work when you're able to see enough to Select the one you want to manipulate. &nbsp;It's possible to stack to a certain extent, and reveal the layer you want (when someone enters a building) but that's going to be somewhat harder when you have a mega-map like this.

I'm fine with doing it up in multiple pages. &nbsp;With my computer and the size of the map, there's no other way really. &nbsp;I couldn't lay down that many tiles in just 1 or 2 pages without the thing locking up on me. &nbsp;I'll play around with it and see how many I can get on one page at the right scale (which does seem to be 5' per square, btw). Where stacking is concerned, I figured I would just lay them down in the proper order. &nbsp;The ground floor will be first, then when I move it to the back the 2nd floor will come up and so on. &nbsp;If they go up and down the stairs repeatedly, I might have to shuffle through the whole stack to get to the right tile, but I'm okay with that. &nbsp;The roof tiles can be shrunk down and pushed off to one side, then slid back when we're done exploring that block (I figure I can use fog of war to black out the insides of the buildings they haven't actually entered while the roofs are removed). I'm going to guess that I'll probably get about two stacks of five 20x20 tiles per page and still retain the ability to zoom, slide around and shuffle the tile stack without getting horrendous lag, but we'll see. &nbsp;If so, that's going to require some 60 pages to map the whole city *gulp*. &nbsp; The main impediment when you have a lot of pages is actually navigating from page to page. &nbsp;Having to slide left to right to select a page (or move players to a page farther down the row) can be quite tedious and cumbersome. &nbsp;I wish it had been designed so the drop down displayed all of your pages in a single window, which you could then select from. &nbsp; Ah well, I'll figure it all out, I suppose. &nbsp;8P

Jason W. said: Where stacking is concerned, I figured I would just lay them down in the proper order. &nbsp;The ground floor will be first, then when I move it to the back the 2nd floor will come up and so on. &nbsp;If they go up and down the stairs repeatedly, I might have to shuffle through the whole stack to get to the right tile, but I'm okay with that. &nbsp;The roof tiles can be shrunk down and pushed off to one side, then slid back when we're done exploring that block (I figure I can use fog of war to black out the insides of the buildings they haven't actually entered while the roofs are removed). For your stacks, I suggest placing all the images for a particular "stack" in a rollable table. &nbsp;Be sure to add them from lowest to highest level order. &nbsp;Then create a Rollable Table Token for them on the map layer (right click and turn off is drawing to get grid snapping), then scale them to the 20x20 grid size. &nbsp;Now you can switch to the map layer, right click-&gt;Multi-sided-&gt;choose side to adjust which one is displayed. &nbsp;Not only will it be much faster from an interface standpoint (and doing it in order means left most is the ground floor, right most is the roofs), it will be more efficient because only the currently displayed layer will be on the table, instead of having 3-4 images behind the current. &nbsp; It also makes building the stack easier, lets you reuse the same block (rotated for variety perhaps?), etc. &nbsp;=D

Also, there's a few suggestions for making the page toolbar better, and some workarounds that can help: &nbsp; <a href="https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/1618045/a-better" rel="nofollow">https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/1618045/a-better</a>...

That is a remarkably clever idea. &nbsp;Thanks for the suggestion! &nbsp;8)

Yeah, I wish I could remember who told me it. (Old school Chris? William?) Regardless, I've gotten a bunch of mileage out of it. :)

That map looks awesome, and I love the rollable table idea.&nbsp; To confirm 1 square=5 foot.&nbsp; I'm old school enough that I forget that with all the new games and editions this convention doesn't hold any more (also as a GURPS player I have no excuse for this).

Thanks, Gabriel. &nbsp;Love your art! &nbsp;I'll probably buy more sets at some point in the future. &nbsp;8)