I was wondering how most people go about cutting a counter sheet. I tried to use the Guillutine (sic) feature of The Gimp last night, but it went into an infinite loop.
This is my first attempt at a module and I found everything in the module portion to be fairly easy and straight forward, but how in gods name do people do modules for the high counter games when they have to select, cut, new image, scale, save as 2000x in a row.
I’m a programmer by profession and I think it would be easier to write up a quick program to do the cutting for me unless someone has some tips on Gimp automation for this task.
I just use the “Divide Slice” tool in Adobe ImageReady (comes with Photoshop I think). So I first create a sheet that may be 10 x 20 counters and save it as a jpg. Each counter may be 70x70 pixels. Then I just divide it up and Save. It’s the only really reliable way I’ve found; I’ve tried a bunch of other things but this has proved the easiest and most effective.
That’s what I’ve done in the past. This is particularly helpful if
you are building a module during the playtest phase, where the counter
sheets are not finalized and you will have to do this over and over
again for the same source artwork.
Unfortunately, it seems that each game has some slight differences in
the die layout and the exact locations of the cut points which make it
hard to come up with a general purpose tool for this.
I use SplitImage (thecastle.com/software.html) to split up the sheet into individual counter images in one go.
Manually rename the images. Each image should have a unique name.
Load the names into Excel and use them to create a script of ImageMagick convert commands to resize, adjust color mode, convert format, add a border etc.
Run the ImageMagick script to create the final counters.
Steps 3-4 can be repeated as desired to change size/border etc. of all counters at once.
Regards,
Brent.
Brent Easton
Analyst/Programmer
University of Western Sydney
Email: b.easton@uws.edu.au