 November 15, 2007 - 1:45am | First of all, the ships you've been doing are great! Thanks for sharing. :) Second, is there any chance you could render them from a top-down perspective on a transparent background in PNG format? That would make the ships ideal for VTT use. |
November 15, 2007 - 3:24am | Virtual Table Tops for online gaming with remote players. Programs like MapTool and Battlegrounds. Basically, graphics are turned into virtual minis that people control and use on different maps. A top-down image could also be used to make chit-like cut-outs for face-to-face games too. Check out the Chit-Factory project to see what I mean: http://starfrontiers.us/node/1822 There I've started skinning some of CCR's chits to make chits/tokens that would be more fun to either print out or use in Virtual Gaming. Your ships would be great to use as well. But they would work a lot beter with transparent backgrounds and a top down view. |
 November 16, 2007 - 1:40pm | Ok. I'll give it a go. What sizes are we after? G. |
November 16, 2007 - 2:23pm | Well, the bigger the better. A good rule of thumb is about 200 pixel per inch (or unit of measurement.) In this case, I'm thinking of basing everything off the Assault Scout which has a 1 inch long miniature and is 5 squares in the Knight Hawks ship comparison illustration. I'm just beginning to do this myself so we'd be kind of starting something of a standard. According to Knight Hawks, here are the comparative sizes of ships: Battleship: 40 squares Assault Carrier: 33 squares Heavy Cruiser: 32 squares Freighter: 30 squares Light Cruiser: 24 squares Minelayer: 14 squares Destroyer: 12 squares Frigate: 10 squares Assault Scout: 5 squares Fighter: 2 squares So if the Assault Scout is 1 inches long at 200 pixels, the battleships would actually print out 8 inches long at 1600 pixels. At 200 dpi, people should also be able to print out a good copy to use as a mini/chit for their face-to-face games. For virtual play, most people will be using between 50 and 100 dpi. But having higher resolution would allows them to zoom in closer and still have more details. Or, for memory concerns, they can size things so that the images are native to the scale they are using. Make sense? At any rate, shooting for higher resolution is just more future-proof. ;) |
