It's all easy:
1) Make shure it has the right size for DOM .. something between 1500 and 3000 pixels wide (the standard maps are 1600, the 240-provinves "orania" is 2400). Use more pixels according to the number of provinces.
2) Draw the borders. Preferably use a paint programm that can do layers (as GIMP; you'll have to convert the image to another format, as tga doesn't know about layers). Put the landscape on the background layer, add a transparent foreground layer to draw borders on. Maybe add a third layer to add additional graphics to the map (special icons, text etc.). Add a fourth layer for the province markers.
SAVE !! (I would suggest saving often, and keeping at least one save from every step)
3) If you're satisfied, merge border and background layer and maybe do some smoothing, anti-aliasing etc.
4) Put the province designators on the 4th layer. Keep an eye on correct positioning - the
base of the flags will appear right above the white pixel. Make shure nothing will be hidden by another graphic in the game.
5) Merge the special icons (which you like a little bit more crispy, I suppose) and the province designators into the background layer.
Save as .tga
6) Make yourself a .map file. Simply cannibalize the file for another map. Copy it, remove all "landname" and "terrain" commands, trim the neighbour list to the actual number of provinces you have on the map. (If you don't know and get the number wrong .. I don't have a clue what happens.). Change #imagefile to point to your .tga
Save as "mywork.map"
7) Fire up DOM. "Load map 'mywork' ", without .map extension .
Go through the endless tedious and boring work of assigning correct neighbours and terrains.
You'll really appreciate the day when Gandalf and PhilD will get that DOM2-random map generator up and running
hope this is helpful ..
A.
[ January 14, 2004, 22:48: Message edited by: Arralen ]