counter quirks

Peristarkawan · Post by **Peristarkawan** » 06 Aug 2007, 19:37

I ran into a couple of issues creating a counter sheet. The first was that the counters on the sheet are widely spaced -- the spaces between counters are approximately as wide as the counters themselves. I had no trouble creating a mask to handle this, but I found that manipulating stacks of these counters is difficult, because the counters get widely spaced apart when the stack is expanded, and I have trouble highlighting any of the upper counters in the stack without it collapsing again. In fact, with a stack of just two counters, I cannot seem to select the top one at all without using the stack manager.

The second issue is more of a feature request. Would it be possible to add some sort of left-to-right tiling option for the back image, to override the default right-to-left tiling? The context is that the same set of counters needs to be flippable, but there is no back image available (the counters are intended to be cut out and glued to wooden tokens). I initially just created a blank white image the same size as the front image, and this worked just fine, but it was very bland, and I wanted to still be able to see which counter is which when they're flipped.

So then I created a new back image that was identical to the front image but dimmed. This produced a pleasing result, but then I found that some of the counters had the wrong back! Apparently, the front image is tiled left to right, and the back image is tiled right to left (which makes sense when the image is scanned). To get around this, I had to horizontally flip the whole image, horizontally flip again each of the individual columns, and finally create a second mask file for the flipped image. This works, but the column flips were not very precise, with the result that there's a slight horizontal displacement when any of the tokens are flipped. I tried to redo the flips in a more precise manner, but I found that the columns were not precisely aligned to begin with and gave up on it.

Despite that, the end result does look good; it just seemed to be a lot more work to get there than was necessary. I think that a left-to-right tiling option would be the ideal solution for this sort of situation, and it certainly would have saved me a bit of work.

Post by **Jerome** » 07 Aug 2007, 11:30

Hi!

If your counters are widely spaced on the counter sheet, the best thing to do is to declare one counter section per counter instead of a single counter section for the whole grid of counters. You will then have to indicate a set of coordinates for each counter. It's more work but it will probably end up being simpler, because you won't have to struggle against the inversion of the tiling order for the back image: you get to indicate separate coodinates for the front and the back, so it's ok if the counters are organized from left to right in the back image.
Is it clear?

Peristarkawan · Post by **Peristarkawan** » 07 Aug 2007, 15:36

Thanks, that makes sense. I can understand if the wide spacing makes multiple counters per section a problem. I think the tiling order option might still be useful in general, as it would still be handy in this case if the counters were closely spaced enough to declare the whole thing as a single section.

I'm not looking forward to creating all those counter sections, but maybe I can whip up a GIMP script to do it for me.

Post by **Jerome** » 07 Aug 2007, 21:02

From your last post I suspect you didn't understand what I meant. I recommended you used one counter section per counter, not one counter sheet. A counter sheet is an image file. A counter section is just a rectangular area located on the counter sheet. So normally you shouldn't have to use Gimp scripts. You'll still have all your counters on the same JPEG image.

Peristarkawan · Post by **Peristarkawan** » 07 Aug 2007, 21:13

Yes, I understood. The issue is that the counter sheet is going to have 88 counter sections in it. What I hope to do with the GIMP script is to identify the coordinates of each counter and write the counter section XML for me. I haven't done any GIMP scripting before now, so I'm not certain that it will work, but I'm hoping that it will.

Redcap · Post by **Redcap** » 08 Aug 2007, 19:33

Jerome has suggested that you do a differnt counter script per tile, and this works great; however, if you are savy with any paint program you can just cut and copy each tile into closer quarters and this will 1) cause your ztb file to be smaller because the jpg for you tiles will be more compacted and efficient, and 2) solve your problem with strange behaving counters/tiles. Just a thought.