Images of Westeros, somebody make a map out of it!

[lch]

People have been talking about fantasy books in an offtopic thread and while I knew none of the sagas or authors mentioned in there, I had a look around. I've found an encyclopedia called "The Tower of the Hand" which has a nice Google Maps interface to the map of Westeros which is the world where George RR Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" saga takes place, which might make a nice Dominions 3 map.

I have stitched together the images for the different zoom levels and made versions with and without the labels. But since I don't really know the series and fear that rabid fans will kill me if I make some small factual error, I'll rather place them here and hope that somebody might pick those up to create a map. Attached is a zip file of all the stitched images, with and without labels, in PNG format, and some other reference images which can be used to split the map into provinces and name them. Maybe somebody even owns the "A Game of Thrones" board game, because some of the province names used there are buried in my image.

[lch]

Attaching one of the stitched images (zoom level 3 of 5) as preview pic, too...

Here it is:

[WraithLord]

Wow, very nice work. I do hope some gifted map maker will pick up the glove.

[PashaDawg]

Yes. Nice work, lch. That would make a good map, and I am inspired by the long scroll style. It would be an excellent project for someone who is eager to try the technical aspects of making a map since this one is pretty much drawn and looks great.

[Edi]

There will be a new mapmaking manual out with the next patch, so that will perhaps be of some help if there are new up and coming mapmakers who don't have a lot of experience in mapmaking yet.

[HoneyBadger]

Ofcourse, this means that someone's going to have to make a whole SoIaF scenario, or else it's not going to be much use just having a map.

Isn't there a map with the eastern lands in it? Bravos, the free cities, etc.?

[PvK]

The Oeridia (sp?) map has 1225 provinces, and is freaking enormous, complex, and lots of fun, but perhaps a bit much.

[Edratman]

PvK said:
The Oeridia (sp?) map has 1225 provinces, and is freaking enormous, complex, and lots of fun, but perhaps a bit much.

I agree entirely. I've been playing this map almost exclusively for a few months, but I end up quitting because of the turn times. I believe it has about 1200 provinces, and this appears to be my limit. I put 30 to 40 opponents in it (all eras mod) and it is fun, up to a point. Larger maps would just result in more start variety, but the same time problems after 50 or 60 turns. There just would be more provinces and foes out of reach.

[lch]

Ok, apparently the solution that I provided to count the number of provinces doesn't work because ImageMagick refuses to generate a histogram for an image as big as Westeros.bmp.

What I used to count the number of pixels was some small Python program. It uses PIL, the Python Imaging Library.

Here's my code:

Code:

---

from PIL import Image



img = Image.open("Westeros.bmp")

(xdim, ydim) = img.size

# yeah, this is a hackish way to do things

channels = len(img.getbands())

white = tuple([255]*channels)



count = 0

if Image.VERSION >= "1.1.6":

    data = img.load()

    for y in range(ydim):

        for x in range(xdim):

            if data[x,y] == white:

                count += 1



else:

    data = img.getdata()

    for y in range(ydim):

        for x in range(xdim):

            if data[x+y*xdim] == white:

                count += 1



print count, "provinces"

---

This takes about 30 seconds to complete, because of the for loops which do the pixel checks. There are ways to speed this up. First, you could consider mapping to the luminance:
Code:

---

from PIL import Image

count = list(Image.open('Westeros.bmp').convert('L').getda  ta()).count(255)

print count, "provinces"

---

This takes half as long, but the conversion from the internal PIL format to Python data containers still takes too long. If you want to make full use of the underlying C code that PIL is built on, then you can do the following:
Code:

---

from PIL import Image

count = Image.open('/home/lch/dominions3/maps/Westeros.bmp').convert('L').histogram().pop()

print count, "provinces"

---

This takes less than a second on the Westeros.bmp for me.

The way that I am getting the information that I want here, over histograms, can be done with image editing programs, too. Just look where your image editing program has the Histogram function, and set it to Luminance/Value. Then enter a range of 255-255 (or pick the pure white color) and it should tell you the number of provinces. GIMP seems to have a bug, though: Although it does work correctly with other map images that I have tried, it reports something like 12038 pure white pixels here, which clearly is wrong.

Instructions for GIMP:
- open image
- open Histogram: either through "Colors > Info > Histogram" or "Dialogs > Histogram"
- change channel to "Value"
- enter 255 as left and right limit
- look at "Count" value

Workaround for GIMP:
- open image
- choose "Select > by color" (Shift+O)
- select a pure white pixel
- choose "Edit > Copy" (Ctrl+C)
- choose "Edit > Paste as > New Image"
- do the above, but with 0 and 255 as limits for the range

[Atreides]

Thanks Ich, that'll help a lot when I'm redrawing the map. Much appreciated.