Thread: Māinm, development and stuff

Originally Posted by vman3force

This is really becoming its own style of map - ive never seen mountains represented like that before. Keep up the good work.

This is actually a pretty common style! One of my friends on another channel keeps on :V TOLKIEN TOLKIEN just to annoy me (screeeeew youuuu pthag i know you're not reading this but JUST IN CASE), but it's actually simpler than the style used in official LoTR and Hobbit and Silmarillion maps (which are the same in substance, though their shading is not as simple). But, for example, there's a fanmade LoTR map online where there's a very similar method of making mountains as here (and where I basically cribbed the basics from this time around -- "Oh yeah, I could do it like this"), but the shading style is slightly different: http://3rin.gs/

EDIT:

There is a whirpool. At the center of the woooooorld it's huge, and causes all ocean current patterns.

In regards to the mountains, I was rather referring to the climate color coding; i haven't seen that before anywhere.

Today I finished up the graticule graphics. I do not think I'll add any numbering this time around: it's rather pointless for now.

You might notice the ellipse, and the line at the middle with the irregular intervals. These lines represent the Sun's path over the surface, as seen from the above. The semiellipses depict the Sun's path during the Northern and Southern Summer solstices respectively, and the middle line the two equinoxes, so you can also tell the area of the map where you can actually have the Sun in your zenith (which happens twice a year). The intervals show the hours: if you divide the day into twelve or was it twenty four hours, the Sun will be at tick x by hour x, because its path is circular: it will take a long while to get up, so it'll spend a relatively long period on the eastern and western edges of the map. I hope I got the logic of the interval lengths right, but eh, it's just decoration. There are also degree intervals on the outer edge, and circles depicting the distance from the center.

I also started thinking about populating the map with people. There are small symbols on the map, which either represent big cities, or capitals, or something. The thing is that the scale of this map is huge, and real-world countries, especially in more fragmentary historical times, are tiny things. I refer you back to the map on page one with the size comparison between the Western Hemisphere and Māinm. Also you may notice my old nemesis, the swastika, who always tends to crop up when I do anything graphical or designy. This time it's not that swastikaish, and one person I showed it said it didn't look like one, so I thought, eh, whatever. I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.

Here are some things that are still left undone or in planning stages:

• Flora
• People (the particularly mundane fantasy races I've cooked up for this: people with four fingers! People with tails! People who don't have wisdom teeth!)
• Words and names
• A circle of stars (like a zodiac) on the outer rim of the map, for basic navigation
• A scale
• Ice floats
• Maybe the ocean currents
• Borders
• Cities
• I also need to make more codelangs for this map, probably just deriving them all from Archaized Finnish, because that would be consistent and simple, and maybe one English codelang where I just flip words backwards and go on from that
• All the other stuff that comes outside the map

This looks awesome, Naeddyr! It's amazing to me how different two circular flat worlds can be. You've totally outpaced mine though!

A preview sans weathering, running my paperisation script always takes a long time and I can't be arsed to do any more modifications on its output that I'm going to discard anyhow.

Some more city/state symbols, borders and border shading, and the big one: stars.

Because the sky dome of Māinm rotates around the world only once per year, using it for navigation is about two thousand million billion trillion gazilligoogoolplexthousandpousandultrillion times easier. Depending on the date, superimpose a sky map on top of your ordinary map, then do some calcumulations with the stars regarding their relative positions on the dome, or just take direct bearing from stars close to the rim. EDIT: The star map is then actually a projected hemisphere: in this case, azimuthal orthographic :TIDE

They're a bit unnoticeable right now, I'll color them for the next one.

This gets cooler every time I look at it

Originally Posted by jtougas

This gets cooler every time I look at it

!!

Quick!

Look at it more!!

Its amazing how much information youre managing to cram into one map. Are you worried at all about it getting too crowded with stuff, such that it becomes difficult to read?

Originally Posted by vman3force

Its amazing how much information youre managing to cram into one map. Are you worried at all about it getting too crowded with stuff, such that it becomes difficult to read?

Not at all: I'm worried that I'll have large swathes of blank left over when I'm done.

I'm thinking about forests and other flora: here's a small possible way to do it, similar to my last map. Sparsely set trees. This time, more of a background element than anything, much like the wave pattern on the seas. But, it is also very busy.

I have trouble of coming up with any really good alternatives. Just drawing a line around forests? Colouring? Should this just be a political map?