Increase Maximum Map Size

[Phantom77]

For those who have computers with higher processing power and memory, have you guys in the OWM development team thought about increasing the maximum allowed number of pixels for a map size, when creating a new map?

I think that would be nice.

[Balmung]

Maybe you add some information for the devs about the desired map size ;)

[nDervish]

Maybe you add some information for the devs about the desired map size

That actually dovetails with something I've requested a couple times in the past: In cases where there are both a slider and a text-entry box to set a value, the user should be allowed to manually enter any value they so choose into the text-entry box, without regard for the slider's min/max values. Any set of hardcoded limits on the range of allowed values will inherently be based on assumptions about the user's hardware, intentions, etc., which may not always be true in all cases, so the user should be free to manually override those limits when the assumptions aren't valid.

To put it another way, a maximum map size that's right at the edge of what a machine with 16G RAM and 12 CPU cores is still much smaller than what could be handled by a machine with 1T RAM and 64 cores. The user with the beefier machine should not be constrained by the limits of the less-powerful one.

Making estimates based on the user's hardware and issuing a warning if they request something which exceeds the estimated limits is reasonable, but the user should still be able to dismiss that warning and exceed the limits. But saying "no, you are absolutely forbidden from making a map that can't be handled in 16G of RAM, no matter how much RAM you might actually have" is not so reasonable. Hardware continues to advance year by year and setting hard limits just means that pointless updates will be continually required just to extend those limits to match the capabilities of newer (or higher-end) systems.

[Kanchou]

Maybe you add some information for the devs about the desired map size

That actually dovetails with something I've requested a couple times in the past: In cases where there are both a slider and a text-entry box to set a value, the user should be allowed to manually enter any value they so choose into the text-entry box, without regard for the slider's min/max values. Any set of hardcoded limits on the range of allowed values will inherently be based on assumptions about the user's hardware, intentions, etc., which may not always be true in all cases, so the user should be free to manually override those limits when the assumptions aren't valid.

To put it another way, a maximum map size that's right at the edge of what a machine with 16G RAM and 12 CPU cores is still much smaller than what could be handled by a machine with 1T RAM and 64 cores. The user with the beefier machine should not be constrained by the limits of the less-powerful one.

Making estimates based on the user's hardware and issuing a warning if they request something which exceeds the estimated limits is reasonable, but the user should still be able to dismiss that warning and exceed the limits. But saying "no, you are absolutely forbidden from making a map that can't be handled in 16G of RAM, no matter how much RAM you might actually have" is not so reasonable. Hardware continues to advance year by year and setting hard limits just means that pointless updates will be continually required just to extend those limits to match the capabilities of newer (or higher-end) systems.

The slider/text entry box is mostly to avoid a user accidentally going into an operation that will take forever to complete. I know that annoys me in Photoshop and Blender . Our plan is to just add a way to cancel, or maybe warning that can be turned off.

For the map size it's actually a limitation of the final rasterizer that we are using and that I've been meaning to switch away from. Once that's done, map size should be as large as you want.

With the new branch (in later updates) we are also adding the concept of the map size not being necessarily a pixel size. So you can have an unlimited size map and define a "pixel size viewport".

Thank you!

- Alejandro

[nDervish]

The slider/text entry box is mostly to avoid a user accidentally going into an operation that will take forever to complete.

Offtopic to this thread, but...

The case that first prompted me to want that wasn't one where it could cause a performance issue. I was drawing a map with some kind of linear feature - I think it was a small footpath, using the Path Tool - and I tried to set it to a width of 5 or 10 pixels, but, whenever I typed "10" into the width text-entry box, the tool responded "No! The minimum width is 20!" and set it to 20 instead of the 10 that I explicitly asked for. So I ultimately had to come up with some other method for drawing my footpath, because the map was at a different scale (which made even the minimum 20 pixel width unreasonably huge in-scale) than the tool assumed I would be drawing at.

Fair point on being limited by your rasterizer, though! Now that you mention it, I seem to recall you having said before that you planned to replace it because of the size limitations.

[Phantom77]

Maybe you add some information for the devs about the desired map size

Sorry for the belated response.

Well, I did not have a specific maximum dimensions in mind, but if I recall the maximum right now in OWM is, 20,000 x 20,000 pixels.

Could you developers increase the allowed maximum, to say, 30,000 x 30,000 pixels?