It is with a heavy heart that I announce that long time friend and community member Jim Pierce (@JimP) is no longer among us. He lived to the age of 77 years (June 27th)

He died today, December 19th 2024, after a long period of illness that resulted from complications after his heart surgery back in April.

Jim was one of the real old-timers here in the community, participating in the Campaign Cartographer community long before this forum was a thing, back when we used the mailing list. He joined before me, so I don't know exactly how long he's been around, but it has been a while. The oldest message from him I've been able to find in the mailing list archives was from 2003, but the archives aren't complete and hard to search, so I am pretty sure he started participating before that.

Most of us will probably remember Jim as one of the most prolific mappers around. He always had a bunch of fantasy worlds in his head for which he made maps and websites, never running out of projects, as well as making hundreds of maps for the community atlas. He seemed to always have a head full of inspiration and fantastic ideas, and he cared a lot for all his worlds.

Unfortunately, his hosting accounts have expired, but I've archived his websites at https://jimp.monsen.cc/ where a lot of his work can be found. His contributions to the community atlas can be found at https://atlas.monsen.cc/Search?author=JimP . And lastly, his forum gallery can be found at https://forum.profantasy.com/profile/gallery/30/JimP.

Jim won't just be remembered for his maps though, as he was also always a kind and helpful fellow, always trying to help people with their problems. He also had other hobbies in addition to mapping. He enjoyed playing computer games, Everquest in particular, he enjoyed walking and camping, pearl work and poetry, so I am sure he made his mark on other communities in addition to ours.

Thanks to his sister, Lou Anna, for letting us know what happened. Our love and thoughts go out to you and the rest of your family in this difficult time.

Farewell Jim. We'll miss you. I guess you are on the bridge of the Starship Wanderer now, heading out and exploring the unknown.

Should be fixed now. Turns out that the gallery plugin interpreted the trailing page number (which you can see in many URL's for anything with more than one page) as an album ID, and also lacked the code for knowing the count of albums a user had beyond what is shown on the first page.

Added the necessary code to detect this misplaced page number now, so if I did everything correctly, the pagination on the gallery index page should now work fine.

I'll leave it up to you to decide if you really want that many individual galleries.

There shouldn't be a max limit, but I have currently set it to 25 images per page so people with slower or metered connections can still use the albums without having the entire internet thrown at them at once.

But I noticed that the gallery page itself seems to lack page navigation controls, so everything beyond the 25th gallery get hidden. Seems like something the coders of the gallery plugin forgot about and nobody noticed before now. All the galleries are there, but they're not accessible. I'll try to figure out a way to fix it when I get some time.

As it quite obvious, I am way behind in adding these to the atlas. Sorry for that, but I have had and still do have other things taking up my time as well.

But, I did manage to at least process the winning maps today (Except Lorelei, which need an intermediate map before I can add hers), and I assigned the badges to the winners.

In CC3+, the size of the hex is measured edge to edge. (For a horizontal hex grid, that would be the same as top to bottom, since edges are at the top and bottom). [This means that the corner to corner size will be 1,15 times larger than the specified hex size]

The scale really depends on how detailed you want your world. Hex mapping, by it's nature, do make the detail level a bit simpler for a map. Hexes are also a bit problematic when you want different sizes, because you can't easily line up hexes inside a hex like you can with squares. But the best number is if you use a difference in scale that is a multiple of 3. (As such, your example of using 6 miles, then 24 miles doesn't work too well, because 24 is 4 times 6, and 4 is not a multiple of 3). As long as you use a multiple of 3, you should be able to have a tiling that only includes full and half hexes, as per my diagram below, and corners will line up with each other. (so 6 and 36 would be appropriate values for the two scales in your example)

As for the whole world scale, just continue multiplying by numbers that are a multiple of 3 and establish a size that feels comfortable for you. Generally, I would be very of any size that leaves more than a 100 hexes in any direction, but if you use 36 for regional areas, you could consider 216 for continents and 648 for world size. Those sizes would line up nicely with each other.

But, then there is the big question, do you even need them to line up properly like this? If you map each map individually, then you might not ever have the larger hexes of the regional map be a factor at all when making local maps. Sometimes, the value of having hexes of nice round sizes can be much more beneficial for the current map. Hexes for the main map could be 250 or 500 miles, continents could be 100 miles, regional ares 25 miles, etc. Unless the maps are going to be directly overlaid each other, you probably aren't actually going to need hexes that lines up with bigger scale maps. But of course, this is up to your own needs and desires.