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How to Easily Add Custom Icons

You’ve got a few options to add custom icons to Worldographer.  Further below are more details of each, but here are summaries of the three methods:

  1. Go to the Configure menu and pick “Add Custom Terrain” or “Add Custom Features” or “Add Custom Textures”.  Then use the file chooser to select images you wish to use. Worldographer will then prompt you to classify each (classic, structure, isometric, etc.)  This is good if you have just a few to add and you only expect to use these in a few maps.
  2. Go to the Configure menu’s “Add Configuration Subfolders”. This brings up a tree-list of folders that you can pick. The software will automatically add all the icons in those folders’ subfolders. See Add Configuration Subfolders below for more details.
  3. For icons that you’re likely to want in many of your maps, you can put them in your “user home” folder’s worldographer subfolder. Worldographer will look here every time it starts up and add these. See Default Worldographer Folder Icons below for more.

We’d advise against loading too many (1000s) of extra images into Worldographer.  At some point you’ll run into memory issues.  For some computers that may be 1000 extra images; for many it will be a few thousand; and as memory increases or for folks with powerful machines you may be able to use more.

Add Configuration Subfolders

To use this approach, you’ll need to put your icons in specific subfolders. By default, it looks for subfolders of your “user home” folder’s worldographer subfolder (c:\users\username\worldographer on windows or /users/username/worldographer on MacOSX–note you’ll have to create the worldographer subfolder). Then you’ll create subfolders based on the icons type and/or theme. For example: C:\users\username\worldographer\202101_Classic_World_Gnomes\

In that folder, you can create Features, Terrain, and Textures folders.  If some features are buildings for Settlement maps, you’ll want to put them in a Structure subfolder of Features. You’ll have something like this:

  • C:\users\username\worldographer\
    • 202102 Battlemat Weird Natural
      • features
      • terrain
      • textures
    • 202102 Classic Weird Natural
      • features
      • terrain
      • textures
    • 202102 Isometric Weird Natural
      • features
        • structure (for buildings)
      • terrain
        • ISO Cols
        • ISO Rows
      • textures
    • 202102 Settlement Weird Natural
      • features
        • structure (for buildings)
      • textures
      • (it is rare to have terrain specific to this level, but you could have a terrain folder as well)

Our recent Patreon icons are already set up following this format, for older sets or icons from other sources you will have to sort them.  If they are from other sources, see Naming Configurations to set Image Sizes & Other Details below for you to set up the size of the icons, background colors of terrain and more.

Once this is set up, when you go to the Configure menu’s “Add Configuration Subfolders” you’ll see a tree list that you can expand nodes and pick the icon sets you need for the map you’re working on.

Note: You can change the default worldographer folder location.  See Changing the Default Worldographer folder below.

Default Worldographer Folder Icons

With this approach, the program simply reads all the files & subfolders of your “user home” folder’s worldographer subfolder (c:\users\username\worldographer on windows or /users/username/worldographer on MacOSX–note you’ll have to create the worldographer subfolder).  Then add subfolders named “features”, “terrain”, and “textures” inside that.  All the configuration information is based on the filename–so the default icons size and background color of terrain will be spelled out in the name. These folders may have subfolders.

Changing the Default Worldographer folder

If you’re having trouble finding this folder, open Worldographer and go to the “Tools” menu and pick the “Show Configuration Folder” menu item.  A dialog will appear and show you the path & folder name it is expecting. You can also change this default folder using the “Change Configuration Folder” item on the same menu.  And you can import specific icons anywhere on your computer via the Configure menu’s “Add Custom Terrain”, “Add Custom Features”, and “Add Custom Textures” menu items, but you’ll have to do this each time you create a new map for any of these icons. (They won’t automatically be available for each new map.)

 

Naming Configurations to set Image Sizes & Other Details

Terrain

Terrain needs a background color and default icon size in the filename.  For example, if you want to add a new scrubland terrain icon, name it “scrubland–85-50-60-29-100-500.png”. What does that mean?  The numbers after the double dash (not an emdash) are: size-r-g-b-a-elevation.  Size is the percentage of a hex the icon should use. RGB are the red, green, and blue percentages while the A is the alpha/transparency level. Elevation is a number (in feet) to denote how high that terrain type is. RGBA are each values between 0 and 100.  For isometric terrain the background is only useful for the mini-map.  One other note for isometric features: they work best if you put them in subfolders titled “ISO Cols” and “ISO Rows” so in Worldographer they can be filtered properly.  Ex: c:\users\username\worldographer\terrain\ISO Cols\scrubland–85-50-60-29-100-500.png

Features

Features need only a default size. Ex: “stealth_bomber–85.png”.  And if you’ve sized the icon so based on 300 pixels as the width of a hex/square in your grid, you don’t need the size.  It will auto-size it based on that 300 pixel size.  So if the image is 270 pixels across, its width will be 90% of a hex/square. The height will be kept proportional. So if that same image’s height is 240 pixels, it will be about 80% of the hex/square’s height. If your feature is a building add a “structure” folder in the features folder and subfolders as desired.  Likewise if the feature is a battlemat icon (door, chest, altar, etc.) create a “battlemat” folder or subfolders of it. And if the feature is a token, create a “tokens” folder for it.

Textures

Textures don’t need any special information. Simply drop the files in the folder. But you can end them with a dash and a scaling factor based on 300 such as “crosshatch-150.png” or “crosshatch-300.png”.

Alternate Classic Expanded Set

Note: If you’re using our pre-created Alternate Classic Expanded set it has a “altclassic.wxx” file in the zip file which is a Worldographer configuration with all the Alternate Classic and Expanded terrain and feature icons pre-configured.  Open Worldographer, go to the File Menu and choose “Load Configuration” then choose that altclassic.wxx file.  Next make your map and it will have all the alternate classic icons pre-set.  You can also do this with an existing map by loading the map first, then loading the configuration file and the icons will change to the Alternate Classic & Expanded icons.  We created this file because these icons mostly replace default icons and it is a bit cumbersome to configure the icon for each of 200 or so icons.