Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Hmm, it is probably not too difficult to make a smaller Version. I'll take a look, as I have some spare time.

Re: Maps available
 

OK now http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion/Dominions2/ has a zipped file added for Miirunst if people have the ability to unzip files.

Re: Maps available
 

The illwinter one is also zipped. 8 meg IIRC.

I have experimented with rescaling. At 1/4 much of the nice information on the map is lost. Also all capital dots disappear entirely (impossible to guess where they should be). For the mapfile to be consistent they must keep their actual position relative the other capitals. Thus they must be rezised so it is possible to see where they are. Then a new white dot may be placed on the smaller map. 1/2 might be better.

Re: Maps available
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I read this and thought I'd do something useful for the community for once: load the various .tga files into Gimp, and do some scaling to make them easier to download for those without fast connections.

But it seems that, when doing this, the white dots that mark the centers of provinces tend to not remain white, which will most certainly mess the game up big time. So I'd have to convert said dots to white again, and that means it cannot be done quickly and with no effort...

Maybe the original authors could offer their maps (TGA files) in a variety of resolutions? I mean, the Ringworld map (just a random example) is nice, but with a 5000x1250, the .tga file is about 11Mb. A .5 scaling would reduce this by a factor of 4, and .25 would leave less than a Mb... unfortunately, I just checked, and doing it from the current file doesn't make it look too good, even without the white dot problem.

So, I'll suggest map makers try to provide a "smallish" Version of their files. Most likely you guys are working with some image manipulation software that would let you do it nicely, right?

Re: Maps available
 

What about dropping the colors. Do the TGA actually use alot of colors between the 256 and the 16 million territory? Thats one of the things I usually recommend for JPG's on peoples web pages. The view doesnt tend to change all that much. You need the 16 mill setting to do alot of fancy things in decent paint programs but usually once the image is done you can pull it back to 256 with a big save in size. I just dont know if TGA makes a difference in that plan

[ January 09, 2004, 00:23: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

Re: Maps available
 

And here I thought everyone had unlimited bandwidth http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif I made em big cause when you zoom in to the level of playability they look better in the higher resolutions. Least, I like em better.

Anyways, I would be happy to scale em down a bunch, I have enough mid-creation Versions of them that it should be no problem. I've been using Macromedia Fireworks and Gimp (I'd love to get gimp 2.0, but was slashdoted yesterday).

Re: Maps available
 

Actually, "Miirunst" uses ~270 000 colors (IIRC - checked yesterday) only. Reducing that to 256 makes especially the red gradients rather pixelated (sp?), but it's something I could live with.

File Size goes down significantly, but I'll have to check again when I'm at home. IIRC it was 16MB than.


One problem with the DOM2 maps is that they compress rather badly - thanks to .tga only beeing able to to RLE compression.

Now Miirunst and the Illwinter maps have lots of microstuctures. These look good, but compress very badly, especially with RLE. ...

STefan

Re: Maps available
 

Ive managed to compress Miirunst and Ringworld to 2.9 and 2.5 megs (zipped) respectivly and sent em off for hosting. There is noticable loss, but if you aint looking too close they look fine for playing on (and should be identical, so a network game will not care if one person has one, one person has another.. though you will have to update and use the Miirunst.map file (instead of the smallmiirunst.map file) if you wanna try this).

I went to work on the valhalla map, but got mad at all the little provinces, increased the size of the map... when I was done it was twice the download size http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif

Re: Maps available
 

ok, about the size of maps,
SOME ARE HUGE!!!!
but what would be the difference in taking the map's tga file and converting it to jpg and post the jpg. people can download the jpg and then convert it to tga on their own computer so they can use it. there are freeware image converters out there that can be downloaded. I have been running tests on my computer and can see no loss in image quality between jpg and tga so that isn't an issue. a 35 meg tga file is just over 2 megs in jpg format.

Re: Maps available
 

If you do make compressed, lower quality maps, please make the high quality Versions available also. Lots of people can download large files with little difficulty, so it would be annoying to be stuck with the low quality Version when a better one exists.