PlanetRorschach v4b - 3D Spherical Map! Fair Starts! 375 provinces! Updated 3/21!
 

Howdy,

There's a lot of great maps out there, but only a precious few are wrap-around. Of course, you could always just click "wraparound" on the map editor and have an ugly, yet functional fair map. Here is my attempt to add to the shortlist of aesthetically pleasing wrap-around maps:
Attachment 7945
PlanetRorschach - The colored dots represent start locations; the yellow dots represent coastal starts that are restricted to sailing nations in the "sailing starts" revision of this map.

This map is actually a 3D sphere: it wraps east-west, and has "polar" connectivity in the north & south. Think of a 2D map of Earth: distances at the 2 poles get stretched out. Same here. [For you non-math-nerds, the classic wrap-around map makes a Torus - not a Sphere - in 3D.]

It has 375 provinces, so plenty of room for those All-Nation games, even EA. 40 of those are sea provinces.

The best part is that it's not ugly: I made it using Ballbarian's RanDom, so it has plenty of pretty colors. I started with a narrow map, then mirror imaged it so that all the boarders lineup. I then fiddled with all the little white pixels in GIMP. I then assigned all neighbors & terrainmasks from scratch. Took about 800% longer than I thought. :D

So, spherical like a Planet, left-right symmetry like a Rorschach test. And fair as hell. For even more fairness, I've restricted the start locations such that no nation will start with fewer than 6 neighbors, though the great majority will have 7. A 2-indy-province buffer exists between all starting locations. There are 24 starts, which is sufficient to support an All-Nations game in any age (see image above). I've prepared 2 revisions of this map: the "with sailing starts" revision restricts coastal starts to sailing nations, the other does not.

This is Version 4b. It corrects a major bug from Version 4, which itself corrected an insidious oversight that could have potentially given sailing nations a significant advantage. A number of connections have been corrected, as were a number of terrainmasks.

Since Version 4b includes an additional province, you must re-download the image file, even if you have a previous Version. This file contains the image and both map revisions mentioned above:

Attachment 7949

Feedback, as always, is appreciated.

Re: PlanetRorschach - Spherical Map! Fair Starts! 400 provinces!
 

OMG it's a Doom Horror!

Re: PlanetRorschach - Spherical Map! Fair Starts! 400 provinces!
 

Doctor, this looks like reproductive organs... again!

Re: PlanetRorschach - 3D Spherical Map! Fair Starts! 375 provinces!
 

A little big for my own games, but very cool nonetheless! :cool:

Would there be any interest in an tool (written in python) to automate this process? I mean, to take a base map image, mirror it, center the central sets of province pixels, add the north/south pole graphic and mirror the map code (terrains, custom provinces, neighbors, etc)?

Re: PlanetRorschach - 3D Spherical Map! Fair Starts! 375 provinces!
 

I think you run into the problem of provs of the same name (when you mirror). I've run into this recently in the Infinite Sands map. I'ts not a huge deal, but somewhat confusing.

Re: PlanetRorschach - 3D Spherical Map! Fair Starts! 375 provinces!
 

Hm, I had not considered that. I could implement custom naming along the lines of semirandom, but focusing more on custom name lists. I'd even be willing to bet that there is a python module out there somewhere that could generate some decent random province names.

Re: PlanetRorschach - 3D Spherical Map! Fair Starts! 375 provinces!
 

Glad you like it:up:

This map is a bit more complicated than a straight mirror image: I removed all the provinces along the "seams" of the maps, then "fused" them together into one new, large, pretty province. I'm not sure how to automate that, but I assume it'd be difficult.

Actually, the mirroring, polar graphic, and province tweaking only took like 10mins. The real hassle was reassigning all the neighbors, as Dom3's internal mapmaker did an abysmal job of that. If someone could come up with a better neighbor-finding algorithm, that would be immensely helpful.

Any comments on the North & South Poles?

Re: PlanetRorschach - 3D Spherical Map! Fair Starts! 375 provinces!
 

Perhaps someone would like to start a multi-age game with this map? I'd be certain to want to try it out. Just a question - can people start in provinces next to each other (or one province in between them)? In a map of this size, that would give a rush nation a very very big starting advantage.

Re: PlanetRorschach - 3D Spherical Map! Fair Starts! 375 provinces!
 

I don't think that maps done this way look very good. I'd rather use maps that have been made wrappable by smudging the edges by a human by hand, like DireAussie's maps.

I have a Python script that does find "sensible" neighbor connections for background images for maps, a lot more sensible than the approach by the Map Editor at least. I was about to make it do the same for wrapped maps, too, but then lost interest. :re: It requires Python and doesn't have a GUI, though! ;)

Re: PlanetRorschach - Spherical Map! Fair Starts! 400 provinces!
 

Sorry, lch, I couldn't resist! :D

I built it with an All-EA nations SP game in mind...not sure how a multi-age game would pan out, but you could reasonably fit ~25 nations w/out any direct neighbors. (Though, there are only 3 underwater starts available in the "fair starts" version.)

But an All-EA nations game would be fun...hmmmmmmm......