Drawing Wraparound Maps - Any Tips?

[PashaDawg]

Hi:

Does anybody have some tricks of the trade for drawing a wraparound map?

Thanks.

Pasha

[Zylithan]

Pasha - I just finished one and am working on another. They are a pain in the *** for me. (Although I did some things that made them harder).

I recommend using layers, had one layer for the white dots and for country borders, and another layer for the pictures. This way the pictures could be changed easily.

If your map has lots of graphics, it might be nice to be careful about the edge areas, or wrapping won't match up nicely. If you are using a program with tilesets or some such to make your map, I might recommend having your map have the same thing on the top and bottom row and far left and right columns, and then you can crop it such that the wraparound works just perfect.

I'm probably doing it wrong, but maybe half of my work on my first map went into making it wrap properly.

[PashaDawg]

Ok! Thanks for the tips. Maybe there is no super easy way.

[Kristoffer O]

Make it water along all edges at first. Seas are easier to redraw by hand.

Then offset x/2 and make an isthmus (is that the correct name) if you don't want the sea nations to get too much advantages.

[Zylithan]

One thing I would encourage is to try to make a small map wrap first. Also, try to do the edges first. You don't want to put a lot of work into the middle and then fail.

Also, I used a commercial map maker (from age of wonders shadow magic... that game's forums is how i found this game) . That's nice for graphics, but makes it harder in some ways than doing it in a real graphics program.

I'll try to upload my map tonight. It's kind of ugly and simple, and niche-y, but I'd still love feedback. As KO says, if you put things that are easy to draw or match (like open seas or plains with no grass) on the edges it should simplify things. Or, and maybe this is a cop out... If you had nice suqare edges to all the provinces on the borders... That wouldn't be hard to wrap.

Actually, come to think of it, I ended up not wrapping my map, so nevermind. I put a ton of work into trying to make it wrappable, but I forgot a few things and decided it wasn't worth it. From a connectivity point of view it wraps (left provinces connect to right) but visually it doesn't.

[Gandalf Parker]

Two other hints.
Look for "tiling" in your paint program or a view program. That will give you a wrapped view (or the map editor in Dom3 itself)

For a really large map, the old way of tiling was to split the map down the middle and paste then on opposite sides. Edit the dividing line then paste them back. Then split across the middle left-to-right and do the same.

[Cor2]

You could always cheat and do a flat map but give the provinces on the edge neigbors on the other side.

[Gandalf Parker]

Actually thats what you have to do.
The undocumented command #wraparound is what tells Dom3 to scroll the image. It doesnt set neighbors so the neighbor commands are also needed.

[PashaDawg]

Wow - I did not realize that Dominions cartography was so fraught with risk and adventure!

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

Here's a tip, gathered from my mad l33t google skillz (I actually own a book on google, you know).

http://www.stink.com/web/webtile/index.html

I don't know exactly how relevant this is, since seamless web tiles are a lot simpler than maps, but some techniques can probably be imitated.

If you use Photoshop or the GIMP, try drawing the troublesome province in the center of the screen, then offsetting it. The idea is that you're always drawing in the center of the image, but you change what the center is.

http://www.cadtutor.net/dd/photo/seamless/seamless.html
http://www.pixelpoke.com/Tutorial%20...0tutorial.html

I hope some of these links are useful. I can help you with just about any Photoshop, Gimp, MS Paint, or Paint.net question, but I haven't created any wraparound maps. I did think that seamless tile techniques may be useful for you, though.