Creating a fake map image file

[llamabeast]

Calling all technical types.

I would like people to be able to upload their own maps to the LlamaServer. However, I'd rather they didn't have to upload the images as well, since they are often large. It occurred to me that the images are surely fairly pointless - the server doesn't have to see the prettiness of the map. So I was hoping to set it up so that only the .map file need be uploaded.

However, you can't actually start a game without the map image present (it gets angry). So, I decided to write a program to create a fake image file, containing only a row of white pixels with as many pixels as there are provinces listed in the .map file. Ingenious, I thought. Unfortunately, it turns out that Dominions isn't happy with such an image file. On trying to create a test game, it said:

N�got gick fel!
can't find a valid starting province
N�got gick fel!
can't find a valid starting province
Aborted

So, my question is: what other features of the image file do we think Dominions needs? Do I need to space out the white pixels somehow? I'm at a bit of a loss, being as I don't know what Dominions actually does with the image file.

Hope someone has some ideas!

Thanks, llama