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......

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

Touché!

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

I'd like to say first that I love this map and it's pretty awesome that you actually managed to make a quasi-spherical wraparound map for the game. However, I have found a bit of a problem with the "fair" version. In SP, I found two nations close to me with only one province between their respective capitals and, given there was all 24 EA nations on the map, it's likely that's happened elsewhere too.

This sort of thing probably shouldn't happen if you want to call it "Fair Starts," so if possible, I'd like to see a version with pre-set starting positions, preferably non nation-specific like Alexander and Asia Twist. I don't know how to mod maps myself, but it shouldn't be hard, right?

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

Editing in start points is easy - even I can do it.

1: Open up the .map file in a text editor (in Windows, Wordpad is better than Notepad). (edit: the previous bracketed statement is intended solely to indicate that Wordpad is better suited to the task of editing .map files than Notepad. It is not intended to imply that Wordpad is a better product than Notepad in any other way, nor that either product is either 'good' or 'better' in a more general sense)

2: To set start points, write in the line '#start <province number>' for each start point you want. I tend to put them above the neighbour information, although I suspect you can put them anywhere.

Example:
#start 23
#start 35
#start 192

would set provinces 23, 35 and 192 as start positions.

Now, armed with all the information you need, you can look at doing your own fair starts if you wish :)

I recommend doing something like printing a copy of the map before you start. I found it a big help to have something I could scribble on as I went.

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

Hmmm, well that is completely unacceptable.

Version 2, on the way...

Re: PlanetRorschach V2 - 3D Spherical Map! Fair Starts! 374 provinces! Updated 3/5
 

Version 2 is out! Several connectivity errors have been corrected, and the "fairstarts" version has overhauled to be more, well, fair.

The "fairstarts" version (see the image above) has 24 starts, which is sufficient to support an All-EA Nations game, though there are no restrictions to who-can-start-where. 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.

Files are available in the 1st post of this thread.

Re: PlanetRorschach v2 - 3D Spherical Map! Fair Starts! 374 provinces! Updated 3/5
 

Nice looking map. Thank you!

Re: PlanetRorschach v2 - 3D Spherical Map! Fair Starts! 374 provinces! Updated 3/5
 

Thanks Pasha, that means a lot coming from the wraparound map guru.

If anyone's interested, I've just announced an All-EA Nations MP game using this map. The signup thread is here. New players are certainly welcome to join.

Re: PlanetRorschach v4 - 3D Spherical Map! Fair Starts! 375 provinces! Updated 3/2
 

Updated to Version 4. It corrects 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 4 includes an additional province, you must re-download the image file, even if you have a previous Version.

This version includes 2 .map revisions. In both, 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 in the OP). The "with sailing starts" revision restricts coastal starts to sailing nations, the other does not.

Enjoy!

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

Yuk. I just found a nasty little bug that can cause the game to crash during game setup. Fixed it. Current Version is now 4b, not unlike our most recent patch :)