ProFantasy Community Forum

Hardware accelerated rendering?

skowskow
in Mapping with ProFantasy's Software
Admittedly, I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I am wondering about the possibility of CC3 leveraging the graphics card to accelerate the rendering operations. Given that PC games these days push millions of polygons out at several frames per second (40+) onto a full HD+ display with full texture, lighting and anti-aliasing, it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect CC3 render a map at 6000x6000 in a second or so. Relatively speaking, there really aren't that many polys or bitmaps even on a HUGE city map.

Our group uses a projector to display maps down onto the gaming table. This opens the door to being able to scroll around and effectively utilize large maps at high resolution. Also, now that I have gotten past a good chunk of the learning curve of CC3, a large portion of map creation time is spent waiting for the screen to update (even with the display settings set with the fast options turned on and sheet effects turned off).

Just curious if hardware rendering or other ways of speeding up the rendering process are on the horizon for CC3. It is really time consuming to have to resort to multiple exports of rectangular sections of a large map and then Frankenstein them together as a manual post-processing step.

Thanks for any insight into this topic!
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Comments

  • mutantmutant
    Our group uses the same set-up and we run our game completely on CC3. I have the same issues and have come up with two solutions:

    1) Turn off sheet effects. This will greatly decrease redraw time, but not as much as I wanted. Also, map suffers from quality w/o sheet effects.

    2) I am still perfecting this, but I am pretty close. In a greatly summarized form, I draw the core map and save as rectangle bmp. I import this drawing into a new map and add any moveable symbols (such as skirnish symbols) to new map. Redraw is great- you have no sheet effects and no polygons. I can give detailed process if you are interested.
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  • skowskow
    edited December 2009
    Hi mutant! I export my maps and use them in some software that I wrote which displays the GM view and the Player view of the map (with fog of war). Unfortunately I didn't search around enough since after it was done writing something from scratch I ran across the rptools.net site which has the most excellent MapTool software which would have done almost exactly what I was looking for. You might want to give it a try - it has a lot of additional features which enhance the game. The only thing my software does that MapTool doesn't do quite yet is scale the map to a fixed physical size (so we have 1 inch squares projected onto our gaming table). That feature is on top of the development list for MapTool though so we may convert to it once that happens.

    You can also create maps in MapTool, but the shadows and other sheet effects CC3 brings to the table add way more dimension to the game. CC3 excels as a map creation tool and MapTool(and my program) definitely dominate the display category. Let me know how if you decide to give MapTool a shot!

    Here is the link directly to MapTool:
    http://www.rptools.net/index.php?page=maptool
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