Leend - first try

[Lyrillies]

Thanks a lot for your input everyone! It's really helpful and I appreciate it a lot!

Concerning the shape of the continent there's a few things I thought about over the past day:
First of all, thanks a lot for that sketch Jalyha! Your suggestions make a lot of sense, and yes it does help.
Despite the fact that all of you are absolutely right and the shape is a problem, I think you won't be seeing any changes on that in this map. It is difficult for me to part with something I've been looking at almost daily for more than ten years… Basically I just need more time to think about what I'm gonna do with the shape. So I will think, and try some stuff and think some more and hopefully come up with a solution for the future. For this mapping project however I'll ignore the issue for now, because this is first and foremost for me to get some experience of how to make a map at all.
But I'll let you know what happens to the shape as soon as I know (if you're interested, that is )

So I started to think about how to continue this little project and I'm stuck. I want to add some border outline but I have seriously no idea what kind of border would fit - something artistic? something useful? the normal black/white checkered grid-based border? I have absolutely no idea!
Or should I do something else first and worry about the borders at the very end? But then how do I continue now? Help please…




@Ilanthar: That's an awesome picture! In another life I would probably do it all differently and become an astronaut… I'll probably dream about that tonight

@Zach: Sounds like a great project! Though it's sad that there's no option of fractalizing custom terrain shapes… I would buy your program immediately if it could do that! The search for something like that was what actually brought me to this forum in the first place *g*


btw: the main lesson I learned from this project so far is that mountains suck!

[Zach]

@Zach: Sounds like a great project! Though it's sad that there's no option of fractalizing custom terrain shapes… I would buy your program immediately if it could do that! The search for something like that was what actually brought me to this forum in the first place

You appear to be my muse for these programming endeavors, because when I woke up this morning I had an idea for a way to fractalize a shape defined by the user. I'm just getting started on it now, so it'll still be some time in development, but...for the past week or so I have spent all my non-mapping free time on writing various mapping programs. The results will be interesting.

I think the sea streams, if you decide to make them part of the world, should be more massive than are shown in that diagram. Like a giant ocean current flowing from the top of the map to the bottom, and curling a little to the left in the process. Of course, continents aren't primarily formed by erosion...but this is a fantasy map; the current could overwhelm any tectonic activity in forming continents.