This Saturday, I will be DMing for my D&D group, over Zoom. Zoom has the ability to show what’s on your screen in a different application, in place of showing your face. I wish to use this to display maps. But on any given map, the players will only have explored part, so I want to be able to show only parts at a time.
The way I’m thinking to do this would be to have something like a multi-layer image. On the back, I would have the entire map, and then in front of it would be solid rectangles that I could move around or delete to reveal the map behind it. But I’m having a bit of difficulty in finding a program that can do that. My first thought was Paint, but from what I’m finding, Paint doesn’t support layers at all, and the “clever workaround” to get it to work is to use Photoshop instead, which I don’t have and don’t intend to buy. My next thought was Powerpoint, Word, or some other MS Office program, but I don’t have those on this computer, either. I tried Wordpad, but while you can import images into it, all it can do with them is put them next to each other, not overlapping.
What’s the quickest, easiest, cheapest way to accomplish this?
Why not just have the map in the back, and use another window in front of the area you want to hide?
The only issue would be remembering not to click on the map itself, which would bring it to the front.
Many of the things that you can do with MS Office you could also do with the free alternative LibreOffice. But I don’t know if either has a good, elegant, easy-to-do way of accomplishing what you want.
I know there exists software to generate and edit maps for RPGs, though I’ve never used anything like that. But I can’t help wondering if any of those programs have the ability to hide and reveal parts of maps as one of their features.
You could do it with Paint using cut and paste. Keep the entire map off screen in one instance of Paint. Copy sections of the map from that and paste them into an instance of Paint that is appearing on your screen. You can remove the maps by cutting them out, covering with a solid block, or just hitting Ctl-Z for the last one.
ETA: I am assuming Zoom allows you to disable certain apps from being displayed remotely so ‘off screen’ doesn’t have to be another monitor.
ETA2: You could also use a clipboard editor to hold portions of the map if you don’t want two instance of Paint open for some reason.