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Holice
2013-04-02, 09:48 AM
With the site search down it's difficult for me to find exactly what I am looking for, so hopefully someone here can point me to the right place.

I want to know if there is an online site, where I can upload an image(map) and have the site scale it to what I want and apply boxes. Then I want to know if I can add tokens to that map and move them around.

The end goal of this would be to be able to have a site a player can go to and see the current map for a game I would be DM'ing, complete with monsters and accurate distances, and while they couldn't actually move any pieces, they can see the map at the start of each round.

The only alternative I see right now is an excel online file with a plain map and color fills to indicate player/monster locations.

Does there exist such a software/website?

Holice
2013-04-02, 01:24 PM
If no one here has any specific suggestions, any thoughts on where else I can ask?

Stray
2013-04-02, 01:38 PM
Roll20 (http://roll20.net/) or MapTool (http://www.rptools.net/?page=maptool) perhaps?
They have a lot more features, but it's not like anyone can force you to use them.

Holice
2013-04-02, 02:17 PM
First off, thank you for the answer.

With maptools thou, you can't modify them from a web page right? You need to open the program, make changes, save the image and then post it elsewhere? And while roll20 is based online, isn't that a full blown tabletop for actively playing?

Stray
2013-04-02, 03:24 PM
They are both full blown virtual tabletops, but as I said, you don't have to use all the features for it to work. With Roll20 you just make the map and token layer visible to players, but you don't give them control of any of the tokens and you should have exactly what you want. I'm sure you can set MapTool up to do the same thing, but it is not accessible through a website as far as I know. So either you make screenshots (which is probably less tedious than updating the excel chart every time) or every player runs MapTools and is connected with you. Depends for what you wish to use it.

Holice
2013-04-02, 03:37 PM
Ok, thanks again.

Searching other sites, it seems like I'm not the only one want a program like this, so hopefully someone with more coding skills and time comes along and tries to capitalize on it.

Tsriel
2013-04-02, 04:50 PM
<3 Maptools

If you're looking for just a flat out mapmaker, Hexographer (http://www.hexographer.com/) and Campaign Cartographer (http://www.profantasy.com/products/cc3.asp) are both excellent options. CC3 is fairly expensive though, but worth the investment if you're involved in a dedicated campaign or just really into making awesome looking maps.

scurv
2013-04-02, 05:26 PM
Dropbox and google drive might be exploitable for sharing maps. Although I tend to make my maps with the level editor from nwn2....so I'm not sure how much that could help you there.

Notreallyhere77
2013-04-05, 06:35 PM
There is one good combat mapping software that I know of.
Step 1: Go to this site (http://www.dndadventure.com/dnda_dm_resources.html).
Step 2: Look for "Combat Tracker" (it will be in blue among the first few entries).
Step 3: Download it, open it, and you can probably figure out what to do from there.

It has distinct tokens for each combatant, tracks initiative and hit points (current and total), and the pictures (for the tokens and for the background image) can be replaced with other pictures on your computer. This way, you could make some tokens stand for treasure or traps (if you ahd appropriate pictures), but then they will be visible to anyone who looks at the map.
I won't lie, there are a couple of disadvantages. One, and this is the big one for me, is that all tokens are the same size, so you'll have to keep track of which squares they really take up.
Another is that you can't scroll unless you have a token offscreen, so if part of your map is offscreen, and there's no one in it, it's effectively out of the game until you manually input the token position. That in itself isn't a big problem, but once the scroll bar is up, all of the tokens are a little out of sync with the battlegrid.