Dave Beauvais’ Web Site

Introduction

MapScaleTool is a little tool designed for use with computer-based RPG tools such as MapTool to assist in resizing scanned game maps to correctly align with the grid inside the application. This tool takes the form of a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet because I lack the development talent to create an actual application for it. It was made in conjunction with Douglas “Kizan” Bowie because we got sick of playing games where the MapTool grid didn’t properly line up with the map image, causing all sorts of gameplay problems while moving characters through the dungeons. Using these directions from the MapTool 1.2 manual, we figured out a relatively simple way of adjusting the images and created this spreadsheet to do the math for us. It seemed like something that would be of use to other MapTool users, so I turned it into an Excel-based application of sorts.

Download

You can download the Excel file here. (27.5 KB) It requires Excel 97 or later or another spreadsheet application which can open Excel files. I’ve received confirmation that OpenOffice works great. The most current version of MapScaleTool will always be linked here. If you link to this little project from another site, please link to this page, not to the Excel file itself.

Usage

The instructions for use are shown in the spreadsheet itself, so I won’t duplicate them here. Basically fill in the boxes with the appropriate numbers and resize the map image to the dimensions shown in the green box. The spreadsheet is currently “protected” — locked by a password. This is to make it seem more application-like by making only input boxes clickable and able to be modified. If you want to poke around and change things, the password to unprotect the sheet is “1234″. If you make any changes, please let me know so I can incorporate them into the main file here if it’s something that could be of use to others.

What you Need

In order to use MapScaleTool, you need an application that can open Microsoft Excel files, as well as an image editor that can be used to count the number of pixels in a selected area, and resize/resample an image. Free software such as The GIMP works well, as do Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, etc.

Comments or Suggestions?

If you have any comments, suggestions, gripes, etc., please leave a comment below!

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Revision History

1.0.1a - 2007-June-01

Fixed typos in the instructions.

1.0.1 - 2007-June-01

Added licensing information, modified instructions section, changed wording of some input boxes. Created this Web page.

1.0 - 2007-May-31

First release, not made public.