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Monday 19 August 2013

Cyberboard: Making some progress

I have been persevering with my attempts to master the Cyberboard Design program ... and I have made some progress.

I decided that trying to make a big campaign map for my first attempt had been - to put it bluntly - overambitious, so for my second attempt I decided to attempt something all together much smaller. When I first started my Colonial Wargames website I created a number of maps that I had intended to use for campaigns and possible scenarios, and I chose to convert one of these (a map showing the Tifooti River estuary and Raffia Island) using Cyberboard.

The original map looked like this:


My first attempt (which used quite large hexes) looked like this:


I thought that this was acceptable ... but that I could do better ... so I repeated the exercise using smaller hexes and the result looked like this:


I am much more satisfied with my second attempt, and this has encouraged me to persist with my efforts.

10 comments:

  1. Looks good! Here's a thought, though, have the map hexes represent your Hexon II hexes on a 1 to 1ratio. This would take more work up ront, of course, but reduce it on the back end.

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  2. Justin Penworth,

    I have been considering doing exactly what you are suggesting ... and the additional time it would take me would be negligible in comparison to the gain in playability.

    All the best,

    Bob

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  3. There is a way of hand-coding maps for Megamek (a java implementation of Battletech) that allows you to put together pre-drawn images into hex maps. I think they're printable too somehow.

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  4. Arquinsiel,

    Thanks for the tip. Once I can 'conquer' Cyberboard I may well try your suggestion, especially if the maps will be printable.

    All the best,

    Bob

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  5. I've seen people export them in .jpg format.... somehow. The main problem is you actually have to type in the co-ordinates and tile type manually, but some people have had great fun replicating the maps from Mechwarrior Online for it.

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  6. Arquinsiel,

    I can export the maps in .jpg format by using the 'Print Screen' function which I can the crop (which is how I did the three maps shown on this blog entry), but so far it has proved impossible to do that with a large map.

    That said, I am not giving up yet!

    All the best,

    Bob

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  7. There are some tools you can use for taking screenshots of things that are bigger than the screen. Windows 7 has he snippet tool, for example.

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  8. Arquinsiel,

    Thanks for the tip.

    My PC currently uses MS Windows Vista, so I don't know if it has a 'snippet' tool like Windows 7 ... but I shall have a look just in case it has ... or has something like it.

    All the best,

    Bob

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  9. You can also download a bmp of a Cyberboard map by loading a trial scenario into the Player program.

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  10. Unknown,

    Thanks very much for the tip. I will try it as soon as I can.

    All the best,

    Bob

    ReplyDelete

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