WIP - Historical Map Game

[Jan]

Hello everyone, I've been making a small program for a historical map game I'm planning to do on another forum. I started on a map and am still looking to improve it(still have to check out the awesome tutorials here) and wasn't sure if I could add stuff from other people to it without violating forum rules here. The objects I wanted to add are these ships made by Black Sea Studios:


I made some ships of my own with paint but they look rather cartoonish in my opinion.


Would it be against the rules to use the Black Sea Studios' ships on my map?

But first I'll elaborate a bit more about the map game. We did a map game in the past on the aokh forum but ended up with a lot of discussions and a too heavy workload for the hosts. So to fix these problems I wanted to regulate part of the game process to take the workload off the hosts and limit the options a bit to avoid discussions. I came up with a program that would use a map of all the provinces and two xml files with the provinces' information and the countries' information. These combined result in the program drawing the countries and the provinces they own on a different map as you can see below. This way it's easy to exchange provinces, change borders, add and remove countries without having to use a paint program and much of the host's work is done on the click of a button.




I hope you guys can give me some feedback on the map and maybe some advice on what could be improved.
Next I'll work on textures.

[aminowrimo]

I'm not sure about the ships, but you're probably best off reading the forum rules, which ought to be here.

You can use GIMP or Inkscape for making the ships. They're both free and ought to work on all platforms.

As to the map, that program sounds fascinating! I'm not sure where you actually want to go with the map, though, so I can't really offer any feedback. If you want it to be merely informational, perhaps add some sort of key to explain which person each color province belongs to. If you want it to be more artistic, change the colors so that they're a bit softer. Things like that.

Also, I know this has no relation to your questions, but I can't help but to point out that to 'collaborate' means working on something with someone else. I think the word you wanted to use was 'elaborate' which means to explain something further.

[kaelin]

Personally, I think the ships you did in paint look better. I'd consider using those and that would eliminate any legal questions.

[Jan]

Well the map is informative but players and the countries/provinces they own change very often. So that might be harder to show dynamically. Although I could have the program generate a legend, which wouldn't be that hard. For the map's style, it's still in it's initial phase so even I'm not 100% certain where to go with the map yet. I was thinking of making it look old and medieval maybe.

Also don't mind correcting me, English is not my native language so I do still make a lot of mistakes. I'm always willing to learn from my mistakes.

Those ships I made over a year ago but I could redo them in Photoshop now.

[Korash]

If this venture of yours has the possibility of generating revenue of any sort, it is always best to either a) use your own material or b) talk to the creator of the material you wish to use. The general assumption here at the Guild is that either you have created/own the work shown, have permission to post the material or are attributing the work correctly. Most studios would be professional and there fore would expect compensation for using their material.

[Jan]

The map game will not be used for any commercial purpose but will be a small non-profit free-time thing. The problem is that Black sea studios has ceased to exist but I guess to be sure I should use my own work.
Thanks for clarifying that.



Edit:
I made some progress on the map and decided to go for an 'older' look. With the help of the tutorials here I created some mountains, buildings and a ships.




Any suggestions?

[Jan]

Hope if it's okay if I bump this thread up.

[Korash]

Yeah, its ok to bump if you need some guidance. I think that the symbols are fine (esp. the boats and hills at France/Spain border), but I would prefer to see them at a higher resolution, because some of the details are hard to see (eg the mountains at the top of Italy). We can host images here at the Guild and in order to do that you need to use the Go Advanced button at the bottom right of the text box. In that screen you will find the Attachment button to upload.

looks good so far.

[Jan]

Like this?

blancoMap.bmp

[Korash]

Yeah something like that

Is this at full scale or scaled down? If scaled down I would suggest posting something larger (I believe that 4megs might be a limit) so we can zoom in a bit more to see the details. However I believe that I can now distinguish the Mosque in Turkey and the Volcano in Sicily