Real world Maps and GIS?

[Stryke11]

I've been wondering about doing a screen capture from Google Maps Satellite of just my area (the San Francisco Bay) and making a map out of it. My only prob is I have no idea at all how to set provinces, borders, that kind of stuff.

For those that know the area, maybe Pangaea as Marin county, Ulm as San Jose/Silicon Valley, Oakland could be Ermor (the local football team, the Raiders, has a skull and crossbones as their icon), SF could contain a few different nations with smaller provinces, like Tien Chi in Chinatown, Marignon or Eriu in North Beach (The humans or Eriu sound like the Milanese, who are Italian). Vanheim could be Alcatraz, with sailing opportunities to all over the place - neat.

I'm sure everyone could do one of their 'hood. The boroughs of New York would be awesome.

[Gandalf Parker]

short answer
At the simplest level, making a map like that only requires one piece of info. The game uses ONE pure-white pixel (single dot) to mark a province. Meaning where the flag shows up on the maps. If you use your paint program to put those dots in then you can use the map editor in the game and have it guess at all the neighbor connections.

longer answer
Using map editor..
Of course, drawing border lines help it to make more logical decisions about neighbors. It likes red borders for this which can be hard on the eyes. But you can use red borders while you are working the map and then change it to something more subtle before you release it for play.

Setting terrains is usually desired so that everyone isnt playing just on "plains". And the game wont crash by trying to assign a water nation to the game.

Having it assign randomly chosen names to the map will hep since it makes it easy to go thru and manually change them to match the real area you are duplicating.

Outside of the map editor....
Setting specific start locations involves manually editing the .map file in something like notepad or wordpad. There is a full PDF on the map commands in your Dom3 doc directory. Here is a link to a quickie list.
http://www.dom3minions.com/docs/map_qref.txt

[Stryke11]

Thanks! I might make this a project!