Maps available

[Ski Anderson]

I have created and tested a new map, but I'd rather have a few more eyes take a look at it before I submit it to Illwinter for posting. It's 101 provinces, no wraparound, and a good mix of water and land.

Farthing Map (.ZIP file) - approx. 2.2 megs

Let me know if you catch any mistakes. I'd also like feedback on the look of the map before I do any more. I used a program called Campaign Cartographer 2, exported it to a big JPG file, dumped that into Photoshop, got rid of all the white pixels, made a few layers, drew in the borders, added the capitals, saved it as a TGA, etc.

It seems ok to me. I found a few problems during my tests but nothing major. I'm just hoping I didn't screw up anything like marking a mountain province as seas or linking provinces on opposite sides of the map.

If you have some time, please check it out and let me know how it is. It's the first "real" map that I've made for this (or any other game) and I would appreciate some honest feedback.

Oh, and I'm the person responsible for the bland United States map that was posted to the Illwinter site so blame me for mistakes on that as well (like the fact that the name is "48 provinces" instead of something useful). I created that as a test before starting on this map and wanted to make it available to people who might use it. I realize that it's nothing fancy but it does seem functional for smaller games, test games, etc.

Thanks a ton,
Ski

[Gandalf Parker]

Very nice. Did Cartographer generate the map with all those trees and mountains? Or is it more like a paint program with terrain-type brushes?

The colors are alittle painful for me. I would pastel it abit. Lighter water and less bright grasslands. Make everything kindof meet closer to the middle.

Cirlani looks great. Good province number and water provinces too!

Way to go Tilt

On Farthing I agree with Gandalf, the Grasslands are too vibrant in my mind, makes it hard to look at. Maybe put some shallow looking water near the coastlines if you like your 'deep water' effect.

Also your Borders are hard to see sometimes, make them more black?

[ January 14, 2004, 20:56: Message edited by: Zen ]

[Ski Anderson]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
Very nice. Did Cartographer generate the map with all those trees and mountains? Or is it more like a paint program with terrain-type brushes?

The colors are alittle painful for me. I would pastel it abit. Lighter water and less bright grasslands. Make everything kindof meet closer to the middle.

It's more of the latter than the former. CC2 doesn't really do any of the work for you, but it makes some of the drawing aspects easier. It has a range of built in "decorations" like the trees, mountains, and so on. It can make your coastlines more jagged, which is helpful too.

I definitely agree with the suggestion about colors. Most of those colors in the map are the defaults for CC2. The actual default ocean color they use is a bright cyan. I darkened up the water (sounds like I darkened it too much) but didn't darken up the grassy color enough.

I don't know if I'll go back and change the colors on this particular map, but I'll work on it for any future maps. I sincerely apologize for anyone that gets blinded by the Farthing map.

On another note, are there particular map styles that players are wanting people to make? Are there gaps in the available maps that need filled? For example, I think I'm going to try to make a small map suitable for just 2 people because I just don't know how many small maps are available right now. What other kind of maps do people want?

[licker]

I prefer maps that have more land barriers than most of the existing ones do. The stratigic importance of provinces isn't really there a lot of the time. The economic importance dominates.

Things like bigger impassable mountain ranges (through several provinces) impassable forests, huge wastes... you can do it for any terrain type other than plains or farm land I suppose. Just some map (size doesn't matter [snigger] ) where the land terrain is broken up a bit would be interesting.

[Arralen]

Originally posted by Ski Anderson:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
Very nice. Did Cartographer generate the map with all those trees and mountains? Or is it more like a paint program with terrain-type brushes?

The colors are alittle painful for me. I would pastel it abit. Lighter water and less bright grasslands. Make everything kindof meet closer to the middle.

It's more of the latter than the former. CC2 doesn't really do any of the work for you, but it makes some of the drawing aspects easier. It has a range of built in "decorations" like the trees, mountains, and so on. It can make your coastlines more jagged, which is helpful too.

I definitely agree with the suggestion about colors. Most of those colors in the map are the defaults for CC2.

---

Gave it a 35-second overhaul with GIMP.

Lighter ocean blue, less bright green, borders visibility improved ...

Get the .tga file here
reworked farthing .tga file

Haven't tested the file, though, so if anything goes wrong using it, just tell me and I'll fix it.

Hope you have fun ...
A.


edit: Had to invest some more 15 minutes to get the white pixels back (obviously something didn't work as it should). Used the opportunity to get the file size down to roughly 1/3 by reducing the colour palette to 256 colours...

[ January 14, 2004, 22:38: Message edited by: Arralen ]

[Tiltowait]

Farthing: Looks great, though I agree with the others about the color, hurts my eyes. (dunno which paint program you use, but some let you have the command 'select similar', so you could select a white pixel/capital, select similar then copy em into a blank picture file, then change the colors and paste em back in, all without worrying about neighboors getting messed up)

I zipped through the province neighboors and did not see any problems. I wish I had that program !

[Tiltowait]

Cant get the new one to load properly.

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by PhilD:

I created a new Version (1.91) that tries to assign a terrain type to each province (based on number of pixels of each color - an ugly hack). It can be found at my lousy Web page. Feel free to copy and redistribute, or even to use the stupid thing.

Edit: the maps provided by Illwinter seem to be around 1600x1200, so that's the kind of size that seems to display correctly in the game. Unfortunately, the program's default size is much smaller. But if you use this size with the default amount of water and land provinces (10 and 90), you will see some small and some large provinces. Well, I did.
[/quote]

OK for those following the DomMap project I have a web directory set up.
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...s2/RandomMaps/

At the moment it runs 30 maps as large as I can get. Could be larger but I have too many things running on my server right now to mass generate the max size. Still they should be about 450 provinces (400 land and 50 sea) and a size of 1200x2400. The pixels are quite scattered which I should probably stop doing since it might be better for Dom2 to leave larger patches of color. The jigsaw shapes of the province borders is set to extreme so that there are lots of strategic locations on each map. Each map is in the directory as .tga, .map, a .zip containing both tga and map, plus a .jpg for easy viewing and for those who would rather snag the jpg. The terrains are fairly well guessed at and the maps should be playable so let me know if there are any problems.

There are multiple directions to move next. More directorys for small, medium, large. Web page thumnails for easier viewing. trying to script something to work the visual parts of them better. Scripting to offer daily maps with my touch of random insanity. Give me a clue.....

[ January 15, 2004, 20:21: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

[Ski Anderson]

Originally posted by Tiltowait:
Farthing: Looks great, though I agree with the others about the color, hurts my eyes. (dunno which paint program you use, but some let you have the command 'select similar', so you could select a white pixel/capital, select similar then copy em into a blank picture file, then change the colors and paste em back in, all without worrying about neighboors getting messed up)

I zipped through the province neighboors and did not see any problems. I wish I had that program !

Thank you very much for the feedback.

Taking the comments that I got into consideration, I tried to make my second map today. Borders are darker and the water and grasslands are less abusive to the eye.

It's a very small map (19 provinces, no water) suitable for 2 player games. It's called "A Question of Symmetry" and anyone who wants it is welcome to take a look at it.

A Question of Symmetry - Small Map - 19 Provinces - Approx. 473k

Comments, concerns, suggestions or fixes are appreciated. I'm completely new to this so I apologize in advance for any troubles.

Ski