Map waypoint distances for world traveling

yarhouse
yarhouse

Something that would be an amazing feature to have in campaign maps would be plotting and calculating distance of waypoints on a map. And I don't mean just the distance between 2 markers, but an actual route of waypoints that a DM can draw directly onto a map.

As a proof of concept (because I've been searching for any tool that isn't Roll20 to do this), I came across this measure distance map that was created in 2006 and is still working. As you can see in the sidebar, there are options to clear all points, clear previous, and to swap measurements between km and mi. 

Having just that bare-bones functionality would be AMAZING for simply tracking distance, allowing a DM to use the one-off distance for days traveled, speed by vehicle, random encounters per day/distance, pro/con of a shortcut vs trade routes, or whatever else they can think of.

If they were save-able as layers to the map, that would be even more amazing, allowing views that could track a games progress with the PCs travel progress. I imagine a session were PCs make a distance travel, and then decide to take the shortcut through the swamp that the old man told them about instead of the trade road, but they get lost and travel randomly because their ranger rolled a 1.

I'm sure there would be some difficulties in setting this up, like having the correct image size or ratio to the specific zoom range of the Google Maps implementation, but this is something I have been searching for and I imagine others have as well.

Comments

  • Bortas
    Bortas
    Posts: 645

    I have to admit, that is really slick.

    -bort

  • cgregory
    cgregory
    Posts: 780

    Pretty cool.

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  • Johnprime
    Johnprime
    Posts: 252

    It does look really great. But the main issue I see is scale, which you sort of mention in your post. You'd have to have something to make sure the scale of the map was include in the calculations because I'm sure not everyone who includes maps on OP draws the maps at the same scale.

    Johnprime

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  • yarhouse
    yarhouse
    Posts: 4 edited April 2017

    I haven't worked with the Google Maps system personally, but looking over the information in the Distance Matrix service gave me an idea on how a player created map could be configured.

    It looks like the distance calculation relies on lat/lon, so maybe there could be an input where the DM can define to OP the relative length of 1mi in pixels on their map, and that value gets thrown into an equation that uses 1mi in Google Maps lat/lon to determine the correct or closest zoom size to have the map generated at.

    And the waypoints could be completely optional. Not every map is a world map, and not every DM might feel the need to use them.

    Again though, I'm just spitballing an idea for implementation without any knowledge of their code.

    Post edited by yarhouse on
  • Johnprime
    Johnprime
    Posts: 252

    I've worked with someone who was using Google Maps system and was not really working on the actual code implementation, just kind of helping him with any JS questions he had and what I saw was really complex.

    I'm about 99.9% sure what you are talking about could be implemented, and as I said, would be really really cool! Plus I think what you're talking about would be a really cool idea!

    I personally use Pro Fantasy's Campaign Cartographer, which has a bunch of info tools, distance, bearing, etc, and their implementation is really cool, so I know stuff like it can be done!

    Johnprime

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    Where the west is really wild!

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  • Bortas
    Bortas
    Posts: 645

    I also like PF's CC3, it's how I made the map for my campaign: https://morwindl-2.obsidianportal.com/maps/87521

    It was my first map, and fraught with issues... but I kinda like it for sentimentality sake, and I've never made a second map to improve upon it.

    I'm kinda bummed that map markers aren't public, y'all stuck with the just the map image.

    -bort

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