Pop-up Map Descriptions
Wyvern
🖼️ 201 images Mapmaker
When browsing Mike Prescott's blog over the weekend, one of the kings of one-page RPG dungeon and scenario construction, I discovered he'd posted recently about Goblins Henchman's idea to use Excel spreadsheets to condense notes for multi-page dungeon RPG modules onto a single on-screen map page. Apparently, you can paste an electronic image of your dungeon map into the spreadsheet and then hide any bits of it you don't want (as it tiles the map repeatedly across the sheet, this is the only way to lose the unwanted duplicates). You can then change the data-entry cells to small squares, and add features such as colours and lines to them, as well as numbers and letters, to which you can then also add a pop-up box of whatever size you like. The pop-ups can contain things like text-only monster stats, room and treasure descriptions, and so forth. The pop-up appears when you hover your cursor over the cell it's attached to.
GH has made a five-minute video, available here on YouTube which shows exactly how all this works. He has another couple of similarly short videos which discuss the concept a little more too, including creating dungeon layouts just using the spreadsheet's ability to add colours and lines to individual cells.
When reading Monsen's latest comments about the upgraded Atlas facilities thanks to the fresh CC3+ update, where he mentioned the possibility of adding various toggled options to individual maps now via CC3+'s Sheets - well, you can see where this is heading, can't you!
By chance, I'd already done an accidental trial of this possibility, by fitting some of the Nibirum Star Map FCW files with an optional sheet to show or hide the star colours, something Monsen fitted out with such a toggle feature for the Atlas version. So it would be possible to make similarly toggleable texts available on any kind of CC3+ map, dungeon, wilderness, space, city, etc., etc., with maybe a clickable list of links off to one side, like an interactive map key, or perhaps these links could be scattered over the map, beside the actual locations they referred to. This is the point where I get a bit hazy though, so I'm sure our more technical experts can advise further on this option, as well as what limits there might be to how many such links/extra Sheets could be added to a given map.
I suspect this might work better with the simpler - bicolour style - maps (so, Black-and-White, or the OSR Blue Dungeon styles, say), because they use fewer Sheets and fewer effects than the fancier styles, but again, I'm certain others can advise far better on this aspect too.
However, being CC3+, there'd be few limits beyond these to what besides text lines you could add to such toggled descriptions, or to how they might be styled.
Worth some more investigation would you say?
GH has made a five-minute video, available here on YouTube which shows exactly how all this works. He has another couple of similarly short videos which discuss the concept a little more too, including creating dungeon layouts just using the spreadsheet's ability to add colours and lines to individual cells.
When reading Monsen's latest comments about the upgraded Atlas facilities thanks to the fresh CC3+ update, where he mentioned the possibility of adding various toggled options to individual maps now via CC3+'s Sheets - well, you can see where this is heading, can't you!
By chance, I'd already done an accidental trial of this possibility, by fitting some of the Nibirum Star Map FCW files with an optional sheet to show or hide the star colours, something Monsen fitted out with such a toggle feature for the Atlas version. So it would be possible to make similarly toggleable texts available on any kind of CC3+ map, dungeon, wilderness, space, city, etc., etc., with maybe a clickable list of links off to one side, like an interactive map key, or perhaps these links could be scattered over the map, beside the actual locations they referred to. This is the point where I get a bit hazy though, so I'm sure our more technical experts can advise further on this option, as well as what limits there might be to how many such links/extra Sheets could be added to a given map.
I suspect this might work better with the simpler - bicolour style - maps (so, Black-and-White, or the OSR Blue Dungeon styles, say), because they use fewer Sheets and fewer effects than the fancier styles, but again, I'm certain others can advise far better on this aspect too.
However, being CC3+, there'd be few limits beyond these to what besides text lines you could add to such toggled descriptions, or to how they might be styled.
Worth some more investigation would you say?
Comments
Since there isn't a practical limit to the number of sheets in a drawing, you could actually make a dungeon where each room is on it's own sheet, and you can toggle which rooms to show.
This isn't really a new feature though, but the new toggle sheet command makes it much easier to implement than it used to.
Can you also add the toggle-sheet toggle wherever you wish on the map? Could you, for instance, add such a command toggle to a sheet which could be activated by a separate toggle command on another sheet? I'm thinking here of the way solo dungeon adventures work, like the old Fighting Fantasy style printed game books, where one choice leads to another and so forth in a branching tree of options.
I know we've had discussions on the Forum previously about how to best present features like map keys or other map labels, and how these can sometimes distract from the appearance of the map itself, so the easier access for toggling sheets like this could be one option to get round this problem. It shouldn't be too difficult to implement, given that most text items will be on, at most, a couple of sheets in many maps.