How to make custom maps?

bone_daddy · #1 January 16th, 2005, 11:47 PM

Quick question. Well, maybe not so quick.

Apart from a white dot to designate a province and red lines for borders, are there any other special colors required for making maps. BTW, I've also noticed that some maps use other colors for borders, and at least one (Faerun) doesn't seem to use anything to indicate borders.

I've noticed that the random maps produced using dommap have certain colors assigned to certain terrain types. Are these colors just what the creator of dommap decided to assign the terrain type?

Or is only the white province dot what matters, and is everything else just handled by the *.map file?

Arralen · #2 January 17th, 2005, 03:41 AM

Quote:

bone_daddy said:Or is only the white province dot what matters, and is everything else just handled by the *.map file?

Yes!

You're free to use every .tga you wish as map, as long as it has only few discrete white pixels for use as province markers.

Chazar · #3 January 17th, 2005, 04:20 AM

...which is a bad thing for provinces which are not circle shaped, e.g. clicking a long and narrow province is sometimes difficult (the boundaries inside the tga file are ignored). There should be a map command to unify white pixels, so that a mapmaker could place more than one white dot per province to fasciliate clicking...

Gandalf Parker · #4 January 17th, 2005, 11:24 AM

Quote:

Chazar said:
...which is a bad thing for provinces which are not circle shaped, e.g. clicking a long and narrow province is sometimes difficult (the boundaries inside the tga file are ignored). There should be a map command to unify white pixels, so that a mapmaker could place more than one white dot per province to fasciliate clicking...

You can make the capital dots larger and easier to see. Just dont use EXACTLY white (255,255,255) to do it.

Zen requested, and got added to the Last DomMap, an option to highlight capitals by putting yellow pixels at 4 points connected to it. It is a nice difference.

Chazar · #5 January 17th, 2005, 12:35 PM

@Gandalf: That's not what I meant. I was referring to the problem of selecting a province within the game, which select the closest white pixel to the clicking point, but not necessarily the intended one on maps with province boundaries drawn...

Kristoffer O · #6 January 17th, 2005, 12:47 PM

@ bone_daddy: reddish borders are useful if you don't want to specify every neighbour of every province. The computer uses red colours to guess neighbours. You will probably have to check on all provinces to make sure that they work properly, but it will save you some clicking trouble. Bright red and symmetrical borders will give you a good map file. More brownish or very thin borders, strangely shaped provinces or sea areas will leave you with some provinces with too many neighbours.