Locking An Entity and other question

kieronwilliams80

Hi, Amazing people of the forum.

I have 2 main questions

1st is it possible to lock an entity into place effectively making it non-editable unless unlocked?

the second is, is it possible to make the background bitmap fill less blocky? (i don't mean in relation to the view but the physical number of bitmap squares per map (if that makes sense)

PS. I have tome of mapping and checked the forum, but being a noob I don't know the correct terminology to search the correct thing.

Huge thanks in advance.

Loopysue

If you place the entity on a new layer all of its own (that's a layer, not a sheet) you can freeze that layer. The effect will be that even though it is probably on the same sheet as other entities, it alone will be frozen in place. You won't even be able to select it.

To help you find it among all the other layers if you need to unfreeze it at some point in the future its probably best to name the new layer in a way that indicates exactly what it does, like "FROZEN TREE", or whatever it is.

I would prefer to see the blocky issue before getting too deeply into suggestions about how to resolve it, because it depends on the size of the map and the desired resolution of the export as to whether changing the scale of the fill will help. The pattern you see is called 'redundancy'. Its always there in any seamless fill, no matter how well they are made, but there are several things you can do to alleviate the problem:

- scale the texture
- add another layer above that one with an Edge Fade Inner sheet effect in play and put irregular patches of another similar fill on it to break up the pattern
- totally ignore it until the rest of the map is finished. You will find that the houses, roads, mountains, trees etc will break up the pattern sufficiently that it no longer registers in the brain as being a pattern (unless you have one of those brains that sees patterns everywhere)

kieronwilliams80

the background bit (circled in blue but everywhere)

kieronwilliams80

scale

kieronwilliams80

Hi Sue

Thanks for the freeze, I vaguely remember seeing this in the past. So thank you so much for reminding me.

see what you think on the above, its something that has been bugging me for a while.

Regards

Kieron

kieronwilliams80

I think I may have fixed it by removing the scaling on the bit maps

Loopysue

That's good, but at the same time unticking the scale box only resolves the issue on screen. The texture looks the same (visible at 100% the bitmap size) no matter how far you zoom in or out, but when you render the map you it will produce the same problem - worse the larger you try to render it.

Its an effect I find really difficult to explain.

It would be better if you could scale that texture to roughly the size that it is supposed to appear. I can't make out what texture that is, but speaking more generally if you have a cobble texture that in your estimation covers about 10 square feet in the world of your dungeon, you need to give it a scale of about 10 ft (10 for both x and y scale), so that it will render in a way that it looks right. If that means you have the redundancy problem again it would be worth considering the second option - a new sheet above that one with a nice EFI effect on it, and draw irregular blobs of a similar texture on it to break up the first one. Don't make the blobs too big, though, or you will just end up with a redundancy problem with that second texture.

An option I didn't mention earlier was to use a different texture - one that doesn't have such a pronounced pattern on it.

Also check that you have the display set to a good resolution (click the hourglass and set it to fixed and VH resolution because that is the resolution that the render machine is most likely to use - depending on the size of your render). That will give you a much better idea of what the texture will really look like. For some reason I have noticed that even though the automatic display resolution may be shown as HI, it isn't always displaying the HI version of the textures and symbols in the map. The map is quite often using the VL version of the texture which is a tiny little patch of a thing instead of a decent size. Any kind of a pattern will have huge redundancy when its shown in the VL resolution. (You can check which resolution is being used by looking in the file box at the filename of the texture in the Fill Style Properties box. I bet you will find it is the VL version, which is the very low res texture)

I hope that makes sense

Just as a final note - I've noticed that some people use blur to try and cure redundancy, but in my opinion blurs should be kept for making clouds, smoke or water effects. Al they do to textures that are supposed to look solid is make them blurry. I don't know about other people, but a blurred solid makes my eyes work overtime trying to bring it back into focus, and turns me completely off the map.

kieronwilliams80

Wow

Awesome sue thanks, I will have a look and see. Thanks for the comprehensive cover of this topic, I'll get back if I don't understand when putting in practice.

Thanks again

Kieron

Loopysue

You're welcome

Looking forward to seeing the resolved map.