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Grid sizes in Foundry and on battlemaps - what's your opinion?
🕑 Added 2020-07-13 21:20:36 +0000 UTCAs you all know: Adjusting battlemaps for the use in virtual tabletop software is sometimes a real challenge. Paper-drawn and scanned battlemaps rarely play nicely with the strict geometric grid applied by the VTT software, and sometimes it's almost impossible to make it right.
One particular aspect of that process is open for debate today: How shall we proceed when there is a pre-drawn grid on the map, but it does not match the 5ft grid size that Foundry prefers? The following image illustrates the issue:
On the right, we have the current state: If the map says, that one grid is 10ft, then this exact setting is transferred over to Foundry. In vanilla Foundry, the Token would fill the whole grid, so it would be 10ft large. I scaled the tokens here to 0.5 the size manually to show that this is not a real solution either: Still one grid is 10ft large and can be occupied by one token only, the only thing that changed is the actor ratio which is now correct.
On the left, we do have an adjusted grid. The 10ft grid is split into 2x2 5ft grid blocks, and positioning of the 5ft actors is possible without needing to scale.
Adjusting grid could mean lowering image quality
The drawback is: Foundry has a minimum grid size of 50px. On some maps, the resolution is rather bad, and dividing one square in half means that the grid size will be as low as 22px in some very low resolution maps. In order to fulfil the minimum grid size of 50px, we do need to stretch the image rather significantly in some cases. Stretching images always means a reduced image quality (blurriness, artefacts...) which is not optimal either. This is already an issue with grid sizes of 10ft, but we are having grid sizes up to 20ft and even 40ft - it's not pretty.
A compromise?
So, what are we gonna do about that? Both arguments have their pros and cons. Providing scaled images at a higher resolution is out of scope for me, just to get that out of the way ;)
As a compromise, I made a proof-of-concept mechnism to adjust a 10ft grid to a 5ft grid by automatically calculating needed adjustments to the image size and automatic translation of the walls/ notes etc. This would require that all scene submissions are adhering to the depicted grid size and you can adjust that as needed to a finer grid after the import.
Please note: There might be rounding errors and slight shifts in positioning of the walls and other elements using that method.
Scene approval stop
I received scene submissions where the grid was already lowered to the 5ft scale, as depicted above. Since my approval mod cannot skip submissions (yeah... I know, lazy me!), I want to get your opinion on how to proceed before I reject or approve it. It's really not just my decision and I am eager to hear your opinions. Please vote and comment below.
Stay lovely,
Sebastian
