VTT Settings

[Midgardsormr]

Battlegrounds (aka BRPG) uses a resolution of 122 pixels per grid square (or hex)…

Where the heck did they come up with that number? That's even more arbitrary than 72 (which is at least divisible by 9. I just figured out why the chose that number for the nonsensical "screen dpi." You'd think that would have been far more obvious to a math geek).

Anyway, I shoot for 100px / square in my D&D 4e game, which I display to my face-to-face group on a HDTV. My maps are about 5-10 MB in jpeg format, and my 32-bit png tokens run to about 30k. That's a bit on the large side, really, but since I'm not having to transport the assets over the 'net it works out.

[heruca]

Where the heck did they come up with that number?

Battlegrounds originally had a resolution of 61 pixels per cell (square or hex). I arrived at that as a result of subjective testing of various resolutions. 50 seemed too low for the amount of detail I wanted to be able to show, but I was afraid that going too much higher would lead to file size and bandwidth issues. So I was about to settle on 60 pixels per cell when I realized that, for the snap-to-grid feature to perfectly center a unit in a cell, I would need to have an odd number of pixels. Hence 61 was decided on. At this point in time, Battlegrounds didn't have a zoom feature. When I added zooming, all the graphics ended up pixelating when fully zoomed in. Since Battlegrounds maximum zoom level is 200%, I doubled the resolution of the graphics so that there would be no pixelation even at full zoom. That's how Battlegrounds' resolution ended up being 122 pixels per cell.

Improvement in broadband bandwidth and hard drive sizes over the last few years have resulted in the increased file sizes not being as bad as I'd originally feared when I first started development.