Change the size of a ink drawn line

[markem]

By the way - On the Campaign Cartographer's website forum I saw this really neat thing - Someone did signs for inns.  So I tried it in Visio.  Here are a couple of the signs I made.

[wapperdude]

Those look nice!  Did you create custom wood grain backgrounds?

At the risk of being a pest, and you need not reply to this, did you look at Fractal Mapper?  The interface is not too bad, not as clean as Visio's, but is workable.  I've attached a sample that basically combines (subtracts) various fractal shapes.  The main is the land mass, then two smaller polygons were created and subtracted from the land mass.  Looks like the effect you're trying to achieve.  Anyway, this took about 5 minutes of effort.  Of course, it's not programmable, and, I haven't tried to import custom images.  The biggest drawback is generating very specific river shapes.

Wapperdude

[markem]

That is similar to what I am trying to achieve.  I've got that program (and several others).  I'll have to go back and look at that again.  Thanks for posting it!  :-)

I look around on the internet for various wood layouts and found some fence ones I liked.  Then I imported the image into Visio, adjusted the wood so it was darker and looked more weather beaten.  Profantasy has thousands of images and the contract they used to give out (and may still do so) stated that you could use the images however you wanted.  So the bed, plate of food, empty plate, fork and spoon are all from there.  The lettering I did in Visio.  I decided to not modify the letters and make it semi-transparent because I wanted the letters to stick out.  The rest I made semi-transparent so the wood grain would show through.  I also overlaid the shield shape with a slightly smaller version that just had black and then changed the tansparency on that so it would also darken down the wood.  Then I put a line where the shield shape turned so they look like corners.  With this type of a layout I can adjust the wood to look more red or yellow or even painted.  I can also use Photoshop, Real Draw Pro, Painter, and other of the graphic programs I have to add various things.  If you have never looked at Real Draw Pro - you really should.  The program is by a guy in Russia and it does some amazing things.  It can act as a CAD program but the really neat thing about Real Draw Pro is that it can apply effects directly to a surface.  So you can start with a blank item, apply a wood-like effect to it - then overlay that with a slight metallic effect, do a 3D raised effect, and you suddenly have this terrific looking item.  Real Draw Pro also recognizes that in some pictures there is hidden height information so the darker areas become areas that are cut deeper into the surface of the object and it acts accordingly.  It is also a very fast program.  Everything I have ever done with it is done almost as quickly as I ask it to do it.  There is a slight pause - but not the five or ten minute kind of pause.  Just a second maybe.

Here is something I just finished last week.  It is called Centaur's Valley.  The players in my game are about to go out into the wide world.  Because my world is so deadly, everyone has to start off playing in a "safe" dungeon.  Once they are ready, they leave the dungeon and go out into the world.  This is an example of an area and how I set things up so I can ref the game.  This is why PowerPoint would also be a good option for me.  Because I can make various slides and annotate those slides as I go along.  Again - yet another reason to use Visio because you can copy between PowerPoint and Visio and if you left double-click an image in PowerPoint then Visio automatically comes up to let you modify everything.  :-)

One last reason to use Visio and PowerPoint - on tablets you can view PowerPoint presentations.  So if I take a tablet with me to the games I can show them the pages as needed.  Again, I hope to create a website where I can lay everything out as well as do the rivers, hills, and so forth.  But for now - I want to be able to create and then move the images over to PowerPoint.  I have to say though that PowerPoint 2003 can not even handle all of the images in the main map.  It says "Out of memory" when there is 1.8GB of memory available.  So for the main map - I do have to save it as a JPEG or PNG and the load it in to PowerPoint.  Sad really.  Short sightedness on the part of Microsoft.

Presently I am working on creating my own jQuery-like set of functions because I want to be able to go all the way back to Netscape Navigator v4.0.  I know a few people who still use that.  Seems weird I know - but what can I say?  Also, jQuery does not seem to work on some of my friend's computers.  Don't know why that is - their computers just won't do anything with jQuery.  And here I thought I had found the perfect thing to do javascript in.  :-/

[Jumpy]

This is why PowerPoint would also be a good option for me.  Because I can make various slides and annotate those slides as I go along.

That remembers me of a project of mine that I work on in my spare time to get more familiar with Lazarus (at work I use Delphi).
It's a dungeon masters tool to present maps, pictures (for example of the monsters or end bosses), chapter intro's, background music, hexfield maps of rooms and dungeons with sprites on it to assist the imagination in fight situations (like classic table top games) and a assistant to manage the initiative of players and NPCs.
The idea is to use a beamer or monitor to assist the game session and maybe later on use it together with a team conference software to let players participate that can't be physically present because they live half a world away.

But it's still a work in progress, still playing arround with the database model because I want to make it very adaptive to many rule sets to assist in many typical RPGs and collecting ideas. Trying out different grafic engines. The real coding hasn't even started jet.

[markem]

The main problem with PowerPoint (or rather a tablet's knock-off PowerPoint program) is that the graphics look terrible.  I just tried putting the Centaur's Valley into PowerPoint.  IN PowerPoint under Windows it looks terrific but on my tablet it is really bad.  Very jagged.  I used KingSoft's Office product and also Documents To Go.  Both just.....welll....I wouldn't call it THE ugliest thing in the world - but I would say "Can you say PacMan?" graphics.  So now I just saved...er....I could probably make it into a PDF....hmmmmm.....more later.  :-)

[markem]

Ok first - a very BIG apology to Yacine and everyone else.  Because what Yacine posted did not look like what I was trying to achieve - I discounted what she was trying to say to me.  I sometimes get highly focused on my objectives and do not like to be dissuaded from them and my big objective was to learn how to program Visio. But what Yacine had said kept nagging at me like I had missed something important.

In my endeavors to make this all work I came full circle back to using a simple line pattern.  So I decided to try using Photoshop to create a river-like line pattern.  (See below)  Then I used the Freehand line to create a line and then applied the line pattern.  I then created a new pattern using the same effect to use for roads, and the edges of buildings so everything looked more like it was drawn by hand.  This DOES meet my expectations and it would not have been possible if Yacine hadn't first posted what she did.  So a very big thank you to Yacine and a smack up-side the head to me for being so myopic in my outlook.

But I am still learning more about programming Visio! :-)

By the way - the INK drawing tool causes there to be too many points and the line pattern becomes corrupted with a lot of spikes on the line.  So the freehand line tool has to be used instead.

[wapperdude]

I'm sure Yacine will appreciate the comments.  HE'S good that way.  Seems, to be a common mistake...I know 1st hand!!!      I'm thinking of starting a club!      

Wapperdude

[markem]

Oops!  Sorry Yacine!

[Yacine]

No problem.
Glad you liked the line patterns.
Cheers,
Yacine (Yassin)

[vojo]

for what its worth, I typcially do the following

user.size = width/ <predefined in mm width>
line = 2pt * user.size

if image grows, line gets thicker....if image shrinks, line gets thinner