A Proof of Concept

[NeonKnight]

Looks good. Welcome to the Guild!

[minimal]

Thanks for the welcomes all. Had another idea, gonna try it out but may not have a new image for a day or two (we're also in the middle of packing and looking for new apartments for a move soon).

Having that part working, I generated a new world and went through and painted it section by section until I had all the areas I actually wanted. Now I'm working on options for exporting it.

Honestly, the simplest thing may just be to use a mercator projection at an insanely high resolution for the political boundaries and then resize/take clips of it as needed for area/region maps. Then I can still pull local level snippets from the source.

Trying a 5 by 5 sliced image set now at 5000 px width per slice. I'll stitch those together in PS. My machine is going to hate me by the end of the day.

[minimal]

After a lot of manual stitching I got the full world Mercator map for the new gen into Photoshop where I was happy with it.

Then I started playing a bit. Here's the first result.

I'm not sure I'd do a full map in this style, but I like the effect. If I were to take it further I would flatten out the color areas for the land masses and add in some elevation lines for them.



The important part is that the full world map works in the high rez. Done playing for now, but the next step (probably tomorrow) is going to be to start figuring out an expansion and where I want 'ground zero' to be. This will end up being a steam punk inspired setting by way of generation ship SF. Think Heinlein style colonization on a planet without oil supplies. Coal will be available, but what coal does best is generate heat. That makes a good excuse for steam punk civilizations.