Feedback & suggestion for the atlas
Gathar
Traveler
Hello,
Recently, a friend of mine told me he was looking for a building plan for a RPG session with his children. I told him: Just look at this very nice community atlas which is full of good stuff. However, when showing him, my experience was not very good. I had to start from the very top level, click on the links randomly, hoping that those links would lead me to maps of the scale he was looking for.
So here is a suggestion (which unfortunately would ask more work from Monsen...): It would be nice is the site just contained a flat list of all the maps, it would be even better if tags could be associated with maps, and this flat list can be filtered by tags. Tags could be something like continent, region, city, building, underground, vector, a tag for the main styles, a tag per author...
What do you think of it?
Recently, a friend of mine told me he was looking for a building plan for a RPG session with his children. I told him: Just look at this very nice community atlas which is full of good stuff. However, when showing him, my experience was not very good. I had to start from the very top level, click on the links randomly, hoping that those links would lead me to maps of the scale he was looking for.
So here is a suggestion (which unfortunately would ask more work from Monsen...): It would be nice is the site just contained a flat list of all the maps, it would be even better if tags could be associated with maps, and this flat list can be filtered by tags. Tags could be something like continent, region, city, building, underground, vector, a tag for the main styles, a tag per author...
What do you think of it?
Comments
Or do you mean a separate list of each of those things: continents, regions, cities, individual buildings?
And even as I write this, its beginning to sound rather coincidentally similar to the way the Realm Works version is organised.
As for the tags themselves, I am thinking something along using this list of tags (maybe a few will be added later, based on suggestions, but I don't want too many either):
- Overland: For large overland maps, from smaller local maps up to continent and world size. (not for battlemap-scale maps)
- Underground: For various underground locations, such as cave systems
- City: Used to separate the proper cities from the smaller settlements
- Settlement: Used for every type of settlements, from small villages to great cities)
- Floorplan: For building floorplans, including normal basements
- Dungeon: For the actual dungeons
- Batttlemap: For maps in a battlemap scale. Maps with this tag are ready to use as battlemaps as they are. Dungeon and floorplan maps MIGHT be battlemap-ready, or they might not, so that will vary with the map.
- Character: For CA designs
- Isometric: For Perspectives stuff
- Astronomy: For everything related to space around the planet, such as starmaps, constellation maps and so on.
Several maps will need several tags, for example, big cities are both settlement and city, and a dungeon ready for battlemap use should have both battlemap and dungeon tags. Likewise, JimP's perspective dungeons would carry both the dungeon and floorplan tags. Sometimes, it might be difficult to decide if something is a floorplan or a dungeon, in that case, it might be appropriate to just add both.
I won't be adding tags for authors or continent, the structure in the map tree already provides this information, I only need to extract it. (We already have the maps by mappers page)
For the actual atlas in CC3+ format, I am thinking about making one bookmark file for each of those tags and add the relevant maps to them, so you can easily just open the bookmarks file. I think I can actually generate these bookmarks files automatically from the tags.
Please let me know when the tags are implemented so i can mention it over there.
The search conditions are implemented in such a way that a map need to match all criteria to turn up in the search results, except for the individual tags, where it must match one of the selected tags. I find this the most useful combination, and I am probably not going to bother to deal with the extra complexity of letting people choose and/or behavior for each criteria. To be honest, who would ever really need a search such as "Give me all the maps designed by JimP OR on the continent of Ezrute" (The AND condition of that statement is of course useful, and what the search currently does)
Please give me feedback if anything is not working as intended or any maps are tagged wrongly.
I ask that the Drow Outpost be moved to the dungeon category, thank you.
On a slightly different topic, I like the way all the maps show up as thumbnails under the search. Would it be possible to do the same thing on the Mappers page?
Note that due to how relative paths work in CC3+, these bookmark sets only work when you already have an atlas map loaded up (and the "start screen" doesn't count).
I really think is a great improvement for the atlas !!