Hello everyone. I have a question. Has anyone done anything with the map of Mystara located at file.webalice.it ? It is located in the vaults and you put in the username:andreafrancolini and the password:mystara. You get to download a beautiful full global map of mystara. You have a choice of East, West, or the whole globe.

The problem I am having is that it is way to big for me to print on my computer at home or at work. I have tried changing the .png file to .jpg,.bmp,and .tiff. It will not let me save it as a .gif. I cannot get my paint, or paint shop pro to handle the file.

Has anyone else here worked with the map to cut it down to smaller sizes? I would really love to print out a color copy of this map and place it on my gaming room wall at home. I even have plans to take a picture of me with the map once I am done.

Thanks,
Stone Marshall
aka Multizar

It's a great work, though it is so large it's almost impossible to view/edit.

Anyway, you might use The Gimp (http://gimp.org/windows/) for editing/format change.

Paste it in the first cell of either Excel or Open Office Calc and print it that way. This is a quick and dirty method without any overlap of the image.

The Gimp, as stated above, can also be used to "cut up" a larger image and resave the map in sections. Here's how:

1. Load the image.
2. In the Menus, click on Image --> Scale Image
3. To the right of the Width and Height settings is a chain. Click on it to “break the chain”. This will allow you to set the Width and Height independently of each other. The default is in pixels but I like to change it to inches.
4. The small image of the map is in the window. There is a square that represents the “new” canvas. Move the image around to a new position. Click on Resize.
5. You will now have a small section of the original map. Save it under a new filename and repeat the steps above until the entire map is saved in smaller printable sections. Be sure to overlap the images so your printout can be easily taped together.

--Ray.

^___^ si mine work ... i hope you will appreciate. I have made many diffrent version and now you can see the old one.

Is not very canonic, but is based on the Thibault Sarlat's maps

Andrea Francolini

It looks like you did it in Hex Mapper. Do you still have all of the original files from before you made the combined map?

--Ray.

I like your map very much!
I also have some question: in the "west" map, in the north side of the map, I can see "Oceano di ghiaccio" (meaning "Ice ocean" for not-Italian-speaking people) and "Isole di ghiaccio" (translated: "Ice isles).
Near Isole di ghiaccio there is an island, quite big, with a capital city (red one) and some towers... And just west of it, there is a tundra like area, with a capital too, and some large cities also...
I'm curious about these lands: is there a reference of them in the vaults of Pandius? Does someone evolved two house-kingdoms?
Could you pls post here some reference to these cold lands?

Maybe I could bring there my PCs...

it's a mixed Hex Mapper & Photoshop work... all the original files are in my pc with the other maps but just combined ( too many little map otherwise )

Andrea

Thanks everyone for the input. I will try tonight at work once everything quiets down around here. I will let everyone know if it works and once i paste it all back together and put it up on my wall at home I will take a picture and let everyone see just how big it really is....lol.

Wow... I opened the two files up in GIMP on a machine with 4GB of RAM, and I started hitting swap (virtual RAM/pagefile) right away (and yes, I set a _huge_ tilesize for GIMP to use). They're really big. They look neat at 4% size though (almost no hexes visible).

Well everyone, I tried to use GIMP at home and at work and I simply do not have the RAM to do what I need to do with the pictures . Has anyone here broken the large files down into managable pictures and if so could I talk someone into emailing me the files? My email addy is [redacted]. I would appreciate any and all help. I really want a large full map of mystara for my gaming room

hi Multizar, how big ? i can save the original map in a different format ) maybe jpg ? ) but i'm not sure that your email account can receive it.

Andrea

Ciao Giovanni,

the first one is the canonic reign of Frosthaven ( giants ), while the second is only a specific creation of my campaign.

Andrea

Frosthaven... nice... is it in any canon material? I can't see any reference to it in my Poor Wizard's Almanacs (I,II & III)...

By the way... do you have any material about the second one? If you have something, why don't you senti it to me, also by e-mail (by clicking on my nickname)?

Frosthaven appears in CM1 Test of the Warlords. It's an arctic land populated by some 6000 Frost Giants...

I am thinking if you could split it up in the 50 megs per picture area I should be able to open it at work and you do not need to worry about my email. I have a 1 Gig account

It would probably be easier for Andrea to just email you the original Hexmapper bmps. That way he won't have to spend hours cutting up the pngs. I believe he said that he still had them.

Andrea, If you do.... send them my way too. [e-mail redacted].

--Ray.

OK, i'll try in the w/e to split the 500Mb full Mystara map ^__^.
I'll let you know as soon as i can.

By

Andrea

Hello Andrea....

I was wondering if you have had any luck in splitting up the map files yet?
No rush, I was just bored at work and surfing the internet....

sorry multizar, too busy due to my work. Maybe next w/e i'll have more time

kal

I hope no one has started on this yet. I just modified a gimp-script I found on the web to split images into x columns and y rows. I'll start splitting tomorrow on these big images when I get access to my uber computer again. I have no idea where I'll post the finished product since the file sizes all together should be pretty big.
When I split them, I'll use the smaller of A4 or Letter for paper size. I don't know which is smaller. [Edit: Hmm, just realized, paper size will depend on the DPI (dots per inch) of the printer being used. What's a safe set of numbers for pixels for page width and height for common color printers today? ie, should I make each section 1200x1600 pixels?[Edit Edit: I've arbitralily chosen 3200x2400 since with 1600x1200 it would be 84 pieces of paper for just the west... the map would be 8 feet tall (2.5m!) Together, all the split files are 58MB in size. I'm trying to find room for them on a webserver somewhere.]]

In case anyone is interested, the gimp-script is located here:
http://www.cs.iupui.edu/~dtauriai/rpg/split-image-xy.scm
[Edit: And now for the script I really used; by pixel size instead of by row/column numbers]:
http://www.cs.iupui.edu/~dtauriai/rpg/split-image-xy-bypixels.scm

The original splitting script (only y rows) is here:
http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/lists/gimp-user/2000-March/000951.html
and it's not without bugs. takes a jpg or other RGB image and makes gifs (not bad in this case since the color-depth isn't big).
you'll need gimp (http://www.gimp.org), and you'll have to put the script in your scripts directory (left as an excersize for the end user).

I just printed out one section at 3200x2400 and boy are those hexes tiny (2-3mm across)... I guess 1600x1200 is the better option. That will make the file size skyrocket though [Edit: I just split the files up into 192 gifs, and the total size is only 55MB!], and like I said, you'll have a 2.5m x 3m map on your wall... with a lot of wasted paper and tape [192 pieces of paper].
You're probably better off taking the files on a CD to your local Kinkos or other friendly office copy-center and spending the extra money to print a few poster-sized images.

P.S. also note that this map seems to be set in the future (beyond WOTI): not only is Alfheim ruined, but Ylarum is no longer a desert. It would be nice if we had a map like this where only cannon material was shown, and unexplored territory was either blank or just the terrain, so that players could empire-build.

Okay, I altered the script a bit again. I had thought pngs used lossy compression. Silly me. After transfering 925 pixels of width from the east image to the west (so that both are an equal, and serendipitously useful 12,000 pixels wide), I made 180 png images that measure 1200x1600 (easier to print that way, and works better with gravity if you're using push-pins). Now that I'm not dropping to 256 colors, the images look better, and there's a side benefit that at level 9 compression, the files are only 39MB total.

Of course, 39MB is still bigger than what I'd like to personally host permanently, so if anyone knows of an image upload site that can host unlimited images less than 800KB per image, and has a way to load multiple images at once (instead of doing it one hundred eighty times), please let me know.

I've got the western half up on a site now. Here's an example. The images range from 00 to 89, but there's limited bandwidth, so don't be surprised if someone else beats you to the image...
http://www.image-upload.net/files/6052/Mystara_west_1200x1600_33.png

Edit: Added Skothar's Hemisphere. Same 00-89 range on names
http://www.image-upload.net/files/6052/Mystara_east_1200x1600_49.png

Thank You!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



The maps look good...a few mistakes here and there but overall real good. I printed them out at work at 47%. Thats still 180 pages. I also converted the pics to adobe acrobat. Its now about 30 megs.

I am working on some of the areas at home, such as the ruined alfhiem and yalarium to bring them back to 1000 AC standard. Once I am done I will reprint those pics and then begin working on pasting the files together.

Once all that is complete I will make a wall sized picture of the map and post it here to show everyone what happens when mystara takes over

My girlfriend just rolls her eyes whenever she hears the word "map" now...:heehee

Try www.photobucket.com, they have a tool called flock that allows you to upload multiple images at once - not used it myself but it may help.

Regards
Gary

happy to hear it !!!

the map was built for my own campaign, so it's diffrerent from the canonical.
Multziar send me a photo after that !!! and say sorry to your girfriend by me.

KAL