The fabled tutorial thread on ViewingDale

[industrygothica]

I received my copy of ViewingDale in the mail early last week. I think it's the first time I've received post from outside the US, so that was a bit unique in its own right.

I must say that I was more than impressed with the packaging. I'm not sure what my expectations were, but they were surely surpassed as soon as I opened the box. The installation was a breeze as well.

I'll admit, I'm looking at this utility more for the campaign organizer features than anything else. The first thing I wanted to do was to load my world map up and place Romeda in it's proper location, and then start adding notes here and there, and possibly map a city or two to go along with it. I'll be starting a new campaign in the region fairly soon, so this seems like a perfect way to keep everything nice and tidy.

For some reason, however, I can't get the rectangular worldmap to scale properly; it always wants to come up a distorted square. Redrobes, do you think you could break it down to a kindergarten level for me so I could get it put together properly?

Thank tons!


-IG

[Redrobes]

I must say that I was more than impressed with the packaging.

Thats cool. The box artwork apart from the 3D cover image, insert and card is all done with the app. The whole print industry is totally geared up for Adobe products so I had some problems getting compatible artwork to them.

I'm looking at this utility more for the campaign organizer features than anything else.

Thats its prime directive. Its a VTT second to its world organization aims.

For some reason, however, I can't get the rectangular worldmap to scale properly; it always wants to come up a distorted square. Redrobes, do you think you could break it down to a kindergarten level for me so I could get it put together properly?

Sure.

Theres two stages, getting the image in and making an icon for it.

Image:
In a paint package make a bitmap of the world at a max res of about 2048. Dont worry about the aspect or scaling - thats all part of the icon params. The bitmap can be square or oblong. Lets say its the usual 2:1 aspect and 2048x1024 image. If its a really big image then theres another way but lets ignore that for a while.

In the App, press F2 for "Images and Icons" and the top item is Convert (Import) Image. Hit that button. With the three black paneled dialog up hit the "Load Colour Picture" and browse for your image (BMP, JPG, PNG or some TIF) anywhere on the HDD. Once loaded it should be in the color panel and the Final Image Panel. If the final image looks ok then hit the "Save final image" button and save it into a sensible directory under the ViewingDale/Images directory. The App wont let you go higher than this directory anyway. Try something like Fantasy/Worlds/Romeda or something like that. You can create new sub directories with the top item (Add new directory). Keep a mental note where it is. Theres no scaling or anything to do - thats it. If you browse with windows explorer then the file should be there with a .vmi extension.

Hit F2 again and in the Images and Icons menu hit the "Create New Icon from Image Wizard". It has a few params to fill out and you need to set them all except the Default Origin which is set at Center unless you change that to Bottom Left - which with a world icon is probably a good idea. You can change any or all of these later anyway.

Set the Icon Name - Romeda. Set the directory for it. This is the Icon dir now. So make another set of sub directories like Fantasy / Worlds / Romeda. With "Using Image", browse for the image you created in Images/Fantasy/Worlds/Romeda. Now set the "Width" to be something like "4000 miles" and the "Height" to be "2000 miles" - unfortunately, ViewingDale does not work in curved spaces so does not cope with different map projections. If thats a real problem then you can use jump points for large areas like continents and jump down to smaller maps where the curvature is so small it can be approximated. But ignoring this, once you have all the top 5 params set and the origin either center or bottom left then hit the "Create it" button and it will make the icon that size.

If you hit F3 for the visual settings and press "Grid Size" and set it to "500 miles" and then press 'G' key then the square grid should show you the world has 8 x 4 grid squares. The title bar should show you the scale which would be a big number and you can pan around and see the position update in miles.


Ok, lets say you have your icon and image and its the wrong size or aspect. Load it with 'L' key so its on the screen then press F8 to go to the "Icon Size" view mode. From here you can scale, size and change the aspect of it. You press the arrow keys where right and up is bigger and left and down is smaller. You will see it stretch a bit. Now in the top bar there is the background grid scale which changes dynamically depending on the current icon size. The units are the same as the map grid units so might be in miles now.

When you press the right key it grows at a modest pace. If you press shift key as well then it goes fast (ctrl makes it go slow. Shift + Ctrl is very slow). You can press right and up at the same time and add shift or ctrl as well all at the same time. Keep looking at the background scale and count up the squares its covering. Imagine that the icon is a bit of stretchy paper on a graph paper backdrop. Sometimes you will have to stretch it a lot especially if the map started at 1mx1m. If it stretches right off the page - which is quite common if scaling a lot - or it stretches too small to see well then hit the "Home" button which will snap view to fit.