More layers !

Firstly, if I've got something wrong please let me know. I'm still rather new to this site, but have some experience with other tools.  I'm trying to create an original and rich fantasy setting. I'm having a hard time doing grass with some overlapping dirt overlays, river, path, buildings, trees, etc... This comes from spending over an hour setting up a town and realizing I could have cut that down by a third with these suggestions. 1) Map and background - What would help with this a lot is if you let us load an image to the background or a repeating texture. Then let us position/size it. Then I wouldn't have the problem of things disappearing behind the tiled grass. This makes the solid color more useful as a layer. 2) Separate objects and tokens. This will let me sit someone in a chair without clicking the wrong one when I try to move one. This would let me move trees of the background layer and not have to worry about what I'm clicking when trying to take someone out of cover. Having the 4th layer solves a lot of problems. 3) Fix the grouping - I was frustrated from the first time I tried using this. I had a mill I was making, wooden floor and stone to grind the powder. When I grouped they switched order so I couldn't see the other. Then when I ungrouped, they popped out under another layer when they'd been on top. So I had to go digging under grass and dirt to find them. 4) Let the GM see objects off the map - How many times did I drag items off a crowded area to try to get to the right item to click and bring forward/back? Too many to count. It would be useful to have some more space to play with outside the bounds. This would also be useful as a GM when not using fog of war to place tokens, rather than having to switch layer, switch tokens to visible layer, then switch layer back.   Ok, that's a start for helping set things up. I'm not sure if anyone else asked for these things, but better to ask twice than never I suppose.  *edit* Oops, one more thing. 5) Fix how things line up/size -  I can't get doors between wall gaps at the proper size. Is there a way to turn off snap to grid? I want to make small characters...so I make them half as many pixels and they snap to the corner of any square. Maybe some sort of corner alignment could help that.

1) A note about multiple map elements: If you make a map constructed of many pieces it may slow things down on some peoples computers. To prevent this I suggest merging the images into one image using an image editor such as Gimp. 2)  To deal with multiple overlapping tokens on the same layer you can right click on the token and then click 'To Back' or 'To Front' and that will put the token behind or in front of the other tokens.  3) Grouped objects can be fixed the same way as overlapping tokens. Hit the Esc key (to deselect the group) and then hold down the Alt key while right clicking on the desired object within the group. Then you may select 'to back' or 'to front' for that object and move it to the back or on top of other objects. 4) You can turn on Fog of War and only use it in a select part of the map. Call it your holding area if you wish. If you want to make a space off of the actual map you can do that by increasing the canvas size and then appying the Fog of War to that area.  5) If you hold down the Alt key you temporarily turn off snap to grid. This way you can make odd size objects, odd placements, etc etc. I hope this helps some of your issues. :) - Gauss

1) If you go into the map's page settings, you can set the background color to hex. What I want is to load a pattern or image instead. I know it's going to take some time to load these maps, we'll see if the game is slow. 2) I did that, a lot. The problem is the small number of layers and having too many things stacked up. What I was saying is to make them separate layers. 3) I didn't play with grouping to try to figure out if selection order or anything else made one object go on top of another in an order different than it was displayed before, all I know is it didn't work as expected (group items as I see them without switching them up). I might go back through and group all the roads, grass, etc... Anyone know if grouping reduces load time? 4) Alright, nice idea, kinda odd to have black box on daytime surface, but it works. Maybe I should change it to being able to change map range so I can expend left or up without dragging each layer (hard to select everything when you've covered the map, another reason to put texture on background). 5) OK, that's what I really needed XD No need to apologise, I realize you were trying to help.  I still have to name all the npc, plus build in some macro and a few encounters. Here's what I was working on, at least part of it (top 3rd is cut off).

I personally am the type that would make a map in an image program and then upload it, but I DO like the idea of having an Object Layer separate from the Token Layer. Like you said it makes it easier to select a token and not an object. My last session I used tokens to represent a spreading fire by copy-paste and when it spread onto characters it became a little bit of an issue. Sure I did use the To Back function and all but having a way to designate something separately would be nice, like Even coding things on Token layer as Object or Creature so you only select one when you want to.

Use maptool to create you maps. It is far better suited for making maps.

Call me old fashion, but I think a company should strive to improve their service so that customers wouldn't recommend another service over theirs. XD The way I did it seams to work...I could make everything I didn't want to manipulate outside and upload it, but then I'd have to have to worry about lining up to grid and all. I'd still have to have explosions on the Gm layer, then move to token layer, so when I pasted a full map I wouldn't have to move it off screen to get an explosion that went under it when I moved it to map, which still leaves me with #2 suggestion/problem still. The way I did this also didn't take up any of my storage space.