Sharing maps with other people
I want to share a map with the players in one of my games, so they can have it for reference. They all the Profantasy Map viewer, a couple have CC3. I'm most interested in meeting the needs of the people with the viewer though, as the CC3 users can probably sort things out.
The issue is that I have made use of a number of custom fills as backgrounds for the maps. I want to make up a zip file of the FCW file and the custom fills and give it to my players, and I want them to be able to open it in the viewer so they can see the map as designed.
I'm not sure the best way to do this.
If I have to, I can tell them to "make sure you unzip the fills into //whatever folder is relevant// - they are all tech savvy enough to do that, but I have to know what folder is going to be relevant if I'm going to do that, which means making sure the fills are also in the right folder on my computer when I save the FCW?
I'm thinking there may actually be an easy way to do this. I'm not sure I'm explaining it well, though. Basically I want them to be able to open the file on their computer with the fills in the right place and referenced in the right way, so they see the map as intended.
The issue is that I have made use of a number of custom fills as backgrounds for the maps. I want to make up a zip file of the FCW file and the custom fills and give it to my players, and I want them to be able to open it in the viewer so they can see the map as designed.
I'm not sure the best way to do this.
If I have to, I can tell them to "make sure you unzip the fills into //whatever folder is relevant// - they are all tech savvy enough to do that, but I have to know what folder is going to be relevant if I'm going to do that, which means making sure the fills are also in the right folder on my computer when I save the FCW?
I'm thinking there may actually be an easy way to do this. I'm not sure I'm explaining it well, though. Basically I want them to be able to open the file on their computer with the fills in the right place and referenced in the right way, so they see the map as intended.
Comments
There are other advantages as well but that's the big one.
So if you saved your map in, for example, a folder within My Documents, on a Windows machine,
- Set your zip software to save full [folder] paths.
- Zip up the map.
- Then find the folder with your custom fills.
- Zip up the custom fills.
The zip software should preserve the paths for everything you zipped. Check the paths in your zip file. They should be relative to your root directory. When your players unzip the file, they should unzip it into their root directory. For example, on a Windows machine they would likely unzip the file into C:\. The zip software should add the new folders along with the files.I hope that helps,
~Dogtag
CC3 can reference fills in three different way, absolute paths, relative to the CC3 directory, or relative to the map directory. One of the latter two is generally preferred, especially with map distribution in mind (I prefer relative to the CC3 directory myself, so I have all my custom fills in a sub directory below the CC3 directory). Assuming you do this, open up your map fiile, open up the fill style dialog, and check the paths of your custom fills. To have the map reference fills relative to the CC3 installation directory, the path should start with the #-symbol, which means "cc3 installation directory". So if you have a custom fill called fill.png stored in a folder called custom inside the bitmaps folder inside the main CC3 installation directory, the path in the map should read #Bitmaps\custom\fill.png (and NOT c:\program files(x86)\profantasy\cc3\bitmaps\custom\fill.png). As long as you use the relative indicator, this means that CC3 will find the fill styles on the recipients machine no matter where they have installed CC3. (Some people may have it on
Now, all you have to do is to zip up the fill style files in the custom folder and give them that (tell them to unzip it inside the same path in their CC3 install folder, wherever that might be), and give them the map.
To have fill styles relative to the map location, the procedure is generally the same, but you use the $-symbol to specify a path relative to wherever the map file might be. So if you keep the fills in a subfolder called fills in the same place you keep the map, the path in the fill style dialog would be something like $fills\fill.png. Then just zip up the map and the fillstyle folder, and tell them to unzip it wherever they wish, they just need to keep the contents of the zip file in the same place.
Note that if your map does not already have relative paths for the fill styles as described above, you must of course set that up and save the map before distributing it, but doing so will help yourself in the long run anyway.