November 2007 Entry: Superstition Valley

[Gamerprinter]

Is it possible to rotate the modular mountain elements and still have them work at differing angles?

Of course these mountains could be flipped on the X-axis, and I'll probably being doing just that opposed to creating custom mountains in every direction.

However, because of the upward angles of the slopes, too much rotation would be to obviously wrong, so I don't think you have lots of rotation to work with.

I will be creating mountains in 45 degree angle, 135 degrees and their flipped opposites. I plan to create some rounded south, west, east and north faces and some faces with contorted rocks changing direction suddenly.

Although the modular mountains are proving to work well, there is only a slight amount of reuse value in each mountain module object. By mixing the pieces however, you could the same element more than once, as it is disguised by the other attached pieces.

[Gamerprinter]

Without adding more mountain modules yet, I took the existing ones I had, applied some horizontal flipping and rescaling to create a few more mountain configurations.

And I discovered they don't really work well with much rotation at all.

Anyway, a few more mountain configurations...

(I'll get to buildings later on today...)

WIP so far - mountain mods - attempt 2:

[ravells]

This is really so cool. You can't see the joins. Keep working on this GP, this is probably something you will be able to sell for real money!

[RPMiller]

Regarding matching colors and such - Don't discount translucence. If you keep them black lines on white and then make the white transparent, people can drop the symbol onto any background and have different mountain colors and such.

[Gamerprinter]

Regarding matching colors and such - Don't discount translucence. If you keep them black lines on white and then make the white transparent, people can drop the symbol onto any background and have different mountain colors and such.

Although that is certainly true, the fact that you can't see the join in my maps is because the white is solid. The transparency area beyond the outlined shape is by default "gray". thus the white covers overlap area between mountain modules.

If I were to make the object as "black lines" only, you limit what the modules do by requiring to meet the exact "seam" - its more difficult to join.

I can see the advantages in solid line graphics only, if I could figure a clean way to match up the seams.

Otherwise I only see requiring both black and white to make this object. In the case of color, same thing. Which brings up another problem - if the mountain tops do not touch, the open area at the tops of the mountains are the color of the background beneath the mountain objects. The mapper would be required to place a matching color or fill at the mountain top levels, in situations like these.

[RPMiller]

I've tested out my idea and works just fine with the sample you posted up above of the canyons and mesas. Yes, the mapper has to be creative with the colors/textures used, but the hard work, the symbols, is all done so the background is a matter of splashing around some texture fills.

Once you get a larger volume of symbols done, I'll post an example of what I'm talking about if my description isn't very clear.

[Gamerprinter]

I can understand what you're meaning, and please do provide a sample - I'm interested.

I was just trying to create something more user friendly in this regard, however I hope this wouldn't be a restriction for more creative mappers.

So, what if I were to create a Mountain Mods pack, that includes black and white, black line only and outline with color fill versions all included. So the mapper can decide which module type works best for their methods?

And for this Old West Map and map object challenge, I'll provide all three in the final submission. This of course will be for all map object elements, not just the mountain modules.