MapEditing Faq anuwhere?

[Chazar]

DrPraetorious said:Can anyone recommend a free (as in beer) piece of software I could use to do this natively in .tga files?

As far as I know, .tga files do not support layers, sorry! I meant that you should keep your layered mapfile in your favorite file format and export it to .tga whenever needed. At least that is what I figured so far that I should have done. I havent, so I am stuck with either redoing everything or fiddling around with my tga file...

[DrPraetorious]

I should add - my problem now is when I convert from .jpg to .tga some of my squares get fuzzy for some reason.

[Chazar]

DrPraetorious said:
When the map is played, you have to click on these white squares to select provinces, so they should be fairly big, yes?

NO! Per Province you should place a single white pixel only: When clicking on the map, the game simply selects the province of the nearest white pixel to the click point!

Furthermore, the province flags a placed on top of each white pixel, so you can easily see where provinces are. Therefore in my map, I choose a high resolution in order to hide the little white spots for esthetic reasons. However this has other problems, like being unable to zoom out to view the entire map...

...there are also people around who propose to mark the white pixel by adding a small btight yellow circle around each white pixel, so that a human can spot the provinces easily without the need for dom2 to display flags. This especially helps others to rework your .tga to create variants (At least I think that this is the reason why the map generator does it). However, the circle must be bright yellow instead of white, since each pure white pixel will be a province of its own!

[Chazar]

DrPraetorious said:
I should add - my problem now is when I convert from .jpg to .tga some of my squares get fuzzy for some reason.

Maybe because of jpg compression? Make sure that the exported tga has the same resolution as your source jpg file, for otherwise resampling destroys the white pixels.

You can turn on tga compression, for it is loss-less and therfore does not kill white pixels, but jpg-compression will smoth colors and implies harmful artifacts, so turn jpg compression and color smoothing off entirely.

Another source of trouble could be a conversion of the color-depth 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit. Try to open the .tga file after an export...

[Gandalf Parker]

Yes jpg should be avoided except as a web image AFTER the tga is done.

I would recommend GIMP as a paint program (like the devs use). Its free, and powerful, but not reasy to learn how to use.

[Endoperez]

Can Dominions read compressed, 8-bit .tga? I think that, atleast for mods, the pictures have to be 24- or 32-bit and uncompressed.

[Arralen]

RLE compression works. It's the one The GIMP offers ...

[Chazar]

Back to the original topic: No one seems to do the MapMakingFAQ, but there is some demand and everyone seems to be able to contribute a bit...

So what about starting a wiki? Would anyone else help? I think Arryn's Website offers a Dom2-Wiki, but currently it is locked (at least I cannot see a way how to alter or add anything - the help page talks about certain access levels, so I think it currently set to 'only invited users may edit', but there is no register page either). Maybe Arryn reopens that Wiki if we ask?

[Gandalf Parker]

I would help. I could easily add a wiki to Dom2Minions.com

MAPs is about the only part of Dominions I have alot of notes on. I never did quite get into the MOD stuff. But its jsut like the DomMap utility project which was going strong until Illwinter announced that a map generator was going to be part of Dom3. With those types of changes coming, its hard to proceed with a Dom2 version