Pin Up
Our latest release includes major improvements to the capabilities of pins, including the ability to change sizes, change marker tokens and attach multiple encounters, book references or maps to a single pin.
Pins allow creators to mark a location on a map and attach details to that location, including:
Encounters: the pin marks the location of the encounter allowing the gamemaster to view or start the encounter at the location.
Book References: the pin can have a reference to a location in a book that can provide descriptive information about the location.
Map Reference: the pin can have map references to allow the gamemaster to quickly switch to another map.
Our initial implementation tried to keep things really simple having a single size and shape for the pin description and marker and only supporting a single attached reference for a pin. Over time we discovered, based on feedback, that this was not as simple as we thought and was too constraining. There were lots of individual menus to manage and behaviors like auto setting the size were confusing. Maps could also quickly get crowded with many options for encounters or descriptions and it wasn’t always easy to find what you wanted with many pins on a map.
Edit Pin Dialog
Pins now have their own dialog to see and make changes to the state of a pin, including changing the name. This consolidation allows for more pin options while also reducing the number of map menu options associated with managing pins. The various create pin options of “Add Location” and “Pin Map” have been replaced with a single “New Pin” menu.
Label Size
Shard attempts to select a pin size that will generally be reasonable for a map based on the scale and resolution of a map. This tends to work reasonably for maps that are designed to work on 5x5 grid, but can be unpredictably poor for larger regional maps. To handle these different cases there are two sets of size of the pin. In either case the text and the marker are scaled together.
Scale the current auto size: the default of Normal will keep the pins the same size as previously. The size Extra Small, Small, Large and Extra Large scale that size up or down. These will tend to work best with battle maps.
Set size based on map: scale the size based on the image resolution. The label will be scaled roughly to a font point size with appropriately sized marker. These will tend to work best with regional or world maps.
Marker
Once you have many pins on a map it becomes handy to have a visual indicator of the type of marker, for example: city, capital, encounter, or point of interest. There are now a variety of marker types that you can choose: circle (default), diamond, square, star, triangle, or no marker.
Encounters
Encounters have a special relationship with pins. A pin can be used to view or start the encounter, and if the encounter is started directly or from a book then the map will be navigated to the pin as the starting point of the encounter. Pins can now have multiple encounters. In addition to handling the case where there may be multiple encounters at a single location for different points in an adventure, creators can define different difficulty levels of encounters to allow games of different levels to use the same storyline. Encounters also now point to pins allowing different packages to define encounters for the same pin. The pin edit allows creation of new encounters or to add a link to an existing encounter. Note: that this changes the encounter to only point to the edited pin.
Book References
Pins can reference multiple locations in books. This enables a pin to have multiple descriptive text in books, for example a tavern could have one link to a book describing the history and importance of the tavern and another link to a book section describing NPCs typically found at the tavern.
Map References
Pins can now have multiple references to maps. This handles cases like a staircase where there is a map for the floor above and a separate map for the floor below. It also works well for a teleport location where there could be multiple destinations.
Pin Menus
When clicking a pin on a map there is now a consistent refined list of menu options. Options will only be displayed for valid options depending on the references on a pin. Behavior changes slightly in the case of multiple options. With a single option the action will happen immediately and when there are multiple options a list will be shown.
Start Encounter: This will start the encounter adding monsters and tokens to the tracker and switching the book to the encounter book reference.
View Encounter: This will show a dialog with the encounter information. You can edit the encounter or just use this to preview the encounter.
Go to Book: This will switch the book to show the book reference. This list will also include the book references for any encounters referenced that have book references.
Go to Map: This will switch the map to show the referenced map.
Show/Hide Pin: This will toggle the view state controlling if players can see the pin.
Edit Pin: displays the edit pin dialog for the pin. Note: to delete a pin, edit the pin and then delete from the edit dialog.
Reference Changes
Now that pins and encounters have more independent actions those types have now been added to the reference section. They are both grouped my map name so that it is easier to see related pins or encounters. Since the reference section has been growing a bit out of hand, we also introduced some grouping to make it easier to find things.