What Map Tool Do The Pros Use.

[pistolshrimp]

I've been using "Salem Map Tool" but my map is starting to get too big and the program is throwing me errors from time to time and I can no longer export maps. I've tried a couple of the other ones before but never got into them. Does anyone who does extensive mapping have any suggestions?

It would be great if it could export maps, but it's not a necessity.

[Icon]

I use the map tool, you can try to find a site to host the maps online, would probably be your best bet... what size if your final product right now? I might be willing to trade maps

edit: im sitting on a 9.55 gig folder

[pistolshrimp]

Yeah nothing like that perhaps I should change my post a "decent" amount of mapping. My size is only 283 MB all put together, duplicates removed and everything. I've got a more tiles I'm going through, but that'll add probably 50mb tops when duplicates are removed. Can you still use the Export Map function with the Map Tool to export a jpg/png or does it not work at those sizes for you?

[Icon]

well, alot of it depends on how much is in the work area on the left side, around 10-12 gigs is where i start to have trouble, so i save one big map, then add in a few folders at a time. the thing is a huge memory drain, but even with my computer that i do it on, which is not "great" i can get to 10 gigs without much of a problem, so you should be fine for a while yet I would assume your best bet would probably be to check with clayet, he runs with alot of mappers, people who do it way more than i do, lol

[Kwaad]

I started running into the memory limitations of SalemMapTool when maintaining the public map I used to host. At first I tried solving the issue by separating the map into pieces (NW,NE,SE,SW). That didn’t work though, I spend way too much time trying to update the map. What I eventually ended up doing was adding a new feature to the SalemMapTool (see screenshot, clickable). I added the option to change the 0,0 tile (CTRL-clicked tile) to become any number I wanted it to be. That way I didn’t need to open the whole world map to add new pieces to it. I just worked on a single small session, identified the area. Then I would just export the session with the proper x and z and simply drop those tiles into the main map folder. This simplified and speeded up the process of adding new tiles to the main map a lot.

To look at the actual map I always used a local version pretty much identical to what I used to host.

[pistolshrimp]

Well thanks for the info guys, my windows partition got corrupted the other night and I lost all my maps any way! One could say my maps got raided, time to start again.

[allpedro]

can i use this thread to solve one question i have?
how does map tools works? i just download the software and get it running with the game? is it java? i have a really low end configuration, and i have to use 8x textures so i can walk more smother in my base, the map tool will probably have my fps go even down?

[pistolshrimp]

can i use this thread to solve one question i have?
how does map tools works? i just download the software and get it running with the game? is it java? i have a really low end configuration, and i have to use 8x textures so i can walk more smother in my base, the map tool will probably have my fps go even down?

It's a bit more complex than that. If you are using a modded client and have store maps checked then your map tiles are being saved automatically into the salem/map folder and you probably haven't even noticed it.

The map tool is a seperate program that helps you pieces those map tiles together. It requires some effort on your part, but at small map sizes use less memory than Salem does.

[allpedro]

thanks a lot pistoshrimp, i will try to look for those maps. where can i find the map tool?
(ps: i'm using latikai right now)

[pistolshrimp]

https://code.google.com/p/salem-map-tool/

This is the only one I could ever get to work, tho there are others out there if you check Artifice & Arcana.