RFC: Map Editing Manual

[Edratman]

Good idea.

I think the section detailing actual map making should be the last section of the guide. From my experiences map editing, I am not making a map and do not possess the skills to comtemplate making a map, but I am editing existing maps. I think many more are like me.

Maybe include a example map edit, with a pretender given some items would be a good idea. I really learned how to edit from some examples Gandalf posted way back when. The guide makes sense now that I know how to edit, but seemed pretty confusing initially.

[Sombre]

I think the manual should contain a suggestion of the kind of size the graphic should be in relation to the number of provinces. I mention this because I recently resized a 50 meg map to 10 meg and it's almost impossible to tell the difference, because of proper use of the default map zoom.

[Edi]

Can you give me any hard numbers on that particular example, Sombre? It'd be helpful. Such as what the map dimensions were initially, what they were after and what you changed the defaultmapzoom to.

[Sombre]

Well I'm not really the right guy to ask about maps because I don't do map graphics. I resized the image to 50% and the defaultmapzoom is currently on 1.00, but I don't remember what it was originally.

I think some of the mappers here will be able to give guidelines though.

[Edi]

If you resized to 50% of original, just double the pixel count on dimensions, e.g. 800x600 >> 1600x1200. With targa files, pixel dimension size correlates directly to file size, obviously. I've played around with defaultmapzoom myself, so I'm familiar with it.

[Sombre]

Yeah I know the pixel size (2000x1700 from 4000x3400), I'm saying I don't know the original defaultmapzoom.

Anyway 2000x1700 for 180 provinces on mapzoom 1.00 and it looks pretty good.

[Edi]

Update/changelog:

• Section on obsolete commands and their limited functionality in some cases
• Missing #defaultmapzoom entry added
• Start location commands have detailed explanations
• God commands thoroughly tested and corrected accordingly