Anastasia v1.02 (684-province map)
 

Version 1.02 is now being hosted at the new site, here. Please go there for the newest version, which now includes a custom version with AI pretenders for LA.

The version referenced below is now obsolete.








Anastasia: 684-province Map for Dominions 3
Current version v1.02


UPDATE 2010-04-29

A minor update that increases the map zoom (it was still quite cramped) and marks a couple more provinces NoStart in the Standard Version.

As before, there are absolutely no changes to the actual map TGA image files. So if you've already downloaded them, there is no need to download the full versions attached to this OP. Instead, get the small ZIP with just the updated .map files and readme attached to my latest post. (I can't attach it to the OP because of the 5-file limit).

I have renamed the "cartoonized" version to "artistic," because the "cartoonized" thing is misleading -- that version of the map is most certainly not cartoonish, but that is the name of the GIMP filter used to modify it that way.


DESCRIPTION

Anastasia is an painstakingly-edited and polished 684-province map (561 land, 123 sea), sized at 4000 x 3000, originally generated by Dom3's map generator. Much of the work involved adjusting terrain to make the surrounding sea province regions contiguous (adding channels and such), and cleaning up the borders to be clean and neat. I have also added a couple of mountain ranges beyond those generated and made the rivers a bit nicer.

As of now, it looks like it will make for a very nice epic-scale game, and seems to have a decent number of chokepoints. At 20 provinces per player, it accommodates 28 land players and 3-5 sea players.

Feedback is very welcome.

STATUS

The map itself is in a finished status, and has been through the wringer a few times checking for errors or gaffes.

What remains to be done is (1) to hand-name all provinces using regional naming schemes, and (2) to add a variant that uses a pool of 40 or 50 #start-tagged provinces.

Aside from the lack of hand-naming, the map is quite playable and complete at this point.


OTHER NOTES

The map TGA image file is available in two versions: a standard version and an Artistic version (which gives it something of a hand-drawn look). They are fully-interchangeable in an ongoing game.

The .map and other files in each download are identical, and are provided in both downloads for convenience.

I have put up previews of the final version (standard and Artistic versions) and a preview image of the map as originally generated without the modifications I've made, for reference. If you switch quickly between the images, you can get a sense of how much change it's seen, as well as the nature of the changes.

(If you have GIMP, you could also generate the same version I've put up as the Artistic version yourself using GIMP's Artistic/Cartoon filter -- I used the default settings. It's as easy as, in the latest version of GIMP, pressing ALT-R-A-R, ENTER, and waiting 20 seconds.) It looks a lot better (and more natural) than it sounds. Also, if there is demand, I can also put up a smaller (say, 2000 x 1500 resolution) version if 4000 x 3000 is unwieldy for some.

Re: WIP: As-yet-unnamed 650-province map
 

Select the pure white pixels 'by color'.
Copy and paste them to a new layer.
Scale the image.
Edit the new layer:
Select by color & then fill the diluted pixels with pure white and then merge the layers.

Re: WIP: As-yet-unnamed 650-province map
 

Wow, nice editing.

It looks playable. I think Id make sure that the island in the upper left corner is no-start.

If you generate a map with a higher mountains setting you can get lots of choke points. Check out some of my maps on www.Dom3Minions.com

Re: WIP: As-yet-unnamed 650-province map
 

Ah, good -- thanks Ballbarian. I'll do that. What image size do you recommend as a playable size for that puppy?


Thanks, Gandalf. Yeah, that island would be a brutal starting point for sure. Will do -- though my later intent will be to mark 40 or 50 provinces as possible start provinces and avoid the #nostart methodology (for the same reason I did so in the Glory map redo -- SemiRandom compatibility).

Hey! I had done a lot of scrounging around for Dom maps, and I somehow missed that page. Checking it out -- really nice!

What mountains setting do you use? For this map I went with 30.

Re: WIP: As-yet-unnamed 650-province map
 

Beautiful -- worked like a charm.

In case it helps anyone else, after I copied and pasted the white pixels into a new layer (promoting it to new layer), I then took all the white pixels on the original image and used gaussian blur to make them disappear (as it was keeping little diluted white pixels that were right next to the ones I pasted in after reduction).

And it appears that now I can use MapForge! Yes! (It didn't like the 8000x6000 image.) Whew -- what a relief. I was dreading doing all that work from zero in the game's native map editor.

For now, I'm going to work with the assumption that 4000x3000 is a workable size. Is that a good assumption?

Re: WIP: As-yet-unnamed 650-province map
 

Yeah most of the Map and Mod lists ignore me. The maps because they are "generated" instead of drawn. But if you want to get around that try playing with GIMPs Sepia function to make it look like an old-style pirate map.

I give an example of my full generating string here.
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=44262
I like to run them in batches of 100 at night when I go to bed, then look for a particularly good one in the morning.

Usually I use 50.
But Ive gone as high as 70 on really large maps which gives you almost a maze.

I also prefer green for plains instead of that tan color, semi-transparent light-green for land borders, semi-transparent light-blue for sea borders.

Re: WIP: As-yet-unnamed 650-province map
 

Speaking of GIMP you might want to look at these which were done with gimp playing with various land-generating scripts. But I was too lazy to pursue it further.
http://www.Dom3Minions.com/RandomMaps/projects/GIMP/

Re: WIP: As-yet-unnamed 650-province map
 

Gah. I was wrong. It worked, but not like a charm.

GIMP fails to properly recognize all 700-some pixels when it resamples, no matter what resampling method I use. It seems to keep completely eliminating anywhere from 30 to 60 of the province marker pixels in that layer, whether I color them all white, pure pink or black. Sinc is the only method that gets them all... but... eh, I don't need each province marker pixel transformed into three. Anyone know of a way to get it to not fudge the results on some of them? Use Photoshop/PSP?


Thanks for the tips and the reference to the GIMP land generation trick.

Wow, 100 a night... I took a long time (a week or more) to do 50, but then I was doing them all at 8000x6000, which is now seeming pretty crazy in retrospect. And I wasn't doing it with any automated scripting or anything.

But it looks like a nice stash of maps you got there.

Re: WIP: As-yet-unnamed 650-province map
 

Well, there was no way around the GIMP resampling problem. I could only do it in a way that saved all province marker pixels in PS. Ah well. Now for the grueling work of designating 678 provinces...

Re: WIP: As-yet-unnamed 650-province map
 

Yes I originally did mine at really high resolutions. Then I realized that it was probably wasted effort. If you look at the popular maps people dont tend to like high detail in the scenery. They like seeing it in images here in the forum when you talk about your map. But later it just gets in the way of the game.

Ive played with some things like blur, and sepia, and posterize, etc to try and give the map a low-level drawn-looking effect. Some come out pretty good but I havent found a way to automate it.

Re: WIP: 682-province map [near releaseworthiness]
 

Very interesting... I'll mess around with some of those effects and see how they look. I can put up images if you or anyone wants to see what it might look like with those effects, and I can certainly put up alternate versions if they actually look decent.


Anyway, a preview of the map is up! The .MAP file is very incomplete (no province names, and only about half designated properly), and I'm still revising some province-marker-pixel locations to better center them, but if anyone wants to download it, take a look at it's essentially final form and give me feedback, it'd be much appreciated!

Re: Anastasia (681-province map)
 

The essential bits are basically complete, and the map is up in usable form.

What remains is to hand-name provinces, which may take a while, and to set around 30-50 provinces as #start provinces. There will likely be further tweaking for balance and fixes to any mistakes I made as to province designations.

Re: Anastasia (681-province map)
 

... aaand a question.

How does the game handle the #start listing? I've been going off of the assumption that it basically sets up all start provinces as a pool to randomly select from, and that it hopefully uses some sort of decent way of keeping players from starting in two start provinces simultaneously.

More specifically, if I go wild with #start designations, basically selecting every province on the map with 4 or more neighbors that doesn't have other problems (for example, as shown in the attached image), many of them will be very close together.

Can the game be counted on to be intelligent with this, or must I be more selective and narrow it down to locations that will not allow the game to jam players too close together?

Re: Anastasia (681-province map)
 

I might be hijacking this, but once you create a random map, is there some way to import it into photoshop in order to make it more pretty, just graphics ? I tried importating the .rgb but it didnt work.

Re: Anastasia (681-province map)
 

Yep. But you need to use a program that can read RGB format and then save it as whatever format you want. I believe GIMP can, but I just suffered a catastrophic hard drive crash and am recovering, and don't have GIMP installed to check yet.

Re: Anastasia (681-province map)
 

I use IrfanView for viewing and converting which is free
Be careful though. Dont choose a format such as jpg since it "compresses" the file and will smudge your white-pixels making it not work in the game when you convert back

And yes, #start is pool, and #specstart is specific

Re: Anastasia (681-province map)
 

Thanks, Gandalf.

I did discover that there is definitely a low upper limit to the number of #start provinces (not exactly sure of the number, since I no longer have that version of the map) that prevents the use of a hundred or two hundred of them.

So, for now, it's #nostart or a very specific set of #start provinces (I was using #start to indicate all viable provinces in order to maintain usability with SemiRandom, but I just learned I can't do that.)

Unfortunately, just as a note, I had a hard drive failure and lost all my work on this and other projects. Hopefully some of it can be recovered, but it was pretty bad, as I didn't have any of it backed up. So I may not be able to get a nice, completed version of the map done for a while.

Re: Anastasia (681-province map)
 

As a barely-consequential update, I'm still badly reeling from what has turned out to be a massively catastrophic hard drive failure, but am rebuilding and will soon restart my work on fine-tuning the map again. As it is, I think I put way too many freshwater flags on sites, and it could use a lot of tweaks. And then, of course, there is the matter of province naming.

Re: Anastasia (681-province map)
 

I know that GIMP has a function that allows you to select all pixels of a specific color and then replace it with another, allowing for this problem to be dealt with fairly quickly. I'd bet that most other editors do as well, somewhere.

That's how I convert .jpg to .xcf files to make maps with. It also retains the 255,255,255 color value (at least when placed on their own layer and not on the image layer itself) when converting a file from .xcf to .jpg, so you really shouldn't have any problems getting around the smudging.

Re: Anastasia (681-province map)
 

New version up. See OP for details.

Testing and feedback would be much appreciated. Future work will implement Starts/NoStarts and hand-named provinces.

Re: Anastasia v0.94 (684-province map)
 

Ope! Found a couple of gaffes in the .map files. I've updated the main download in the OP with the fixed files, but I've attached just the updated .map files to this post for anyone who downloaded the main map file and just wants to download the fixed versions without redownloading the whole map.

Re: Anastasia v1.00 (684-province map), now with more flavors
 

Yet another update. This time to a full v1.00. See OP "UPDATE" section for info.

No changes made to TGA files. For those who do not need/wish to redownload the full versions, attached hereto is just the updated .map files and readme.

Re: Anastasia v1.01 (684-province map)
 

Another minor update to the map files. Just a few tweaks; mapzoom increased to 1.25, and a couple more provinces marked as NoStart on the Standard map.

I'm currently slogging through a slate of LA gods and will throw that up fairly soon. The hand-naming is on the backburner for now, though -- I'll pick it up again when I have the time and energy for it.

For those who already have the .TGA files (to which there are no changes in this version), just the .map files are attached to this post.