Māinm, development and stuff

[Ascension]

Good to see you posting again. I always like your work very much.

[Naeddyr]

Thanks, Ascension. Let's see how this goes.



A preliminary look at mountain ranges (the black sprinkles) and pseudo-climes. I have no idea what to do with the winds. Maybe I'll just put down four mountains, each with its own wind god... The West Wind would sit smack dab in the middle of that desert, and blow everything away because he's cross with the Sun for eating all his cookies or something idno.

Here's also a size-comparison:



The land mass of Māinm is roughly the same size as Eurasia and Africa combined (85-90 million square kilometers). The map of Eurafrasia above is in Azimuthal equal area, so that you get a rough idea of areas. The flat world map is of course just.... Flat, because it doesn't need a projection (and is naturally equal area, too).

The diameter of the world (= Sky Dome, in this context) is eh, 18000 kilometers. Around 36 percent of the area is land, rest is corporeal ocean. Just by total coincidence, if the area of one Earth hemisphere was turned into a circle, that circle would have a diameter of 18000 kilometers.

[Naeddyr]

Sorry about the double post, here's a small update.


South is up, east is left, north is down, west is right.

Here's a bit more elaboration on the climates (and some fixing of the geography that didn't look exactly right for aesthetic reasons). Because Māinm is a stationary flatworld (i.e. it doesn't rotate; the Sky Dome does rotate, but only once a year), there are no coriolis forces. The Sun warms the interior "equator", the central line from the East pole to the West Pole more than the north and south, so winds tend to move towards the equator, or maybe rather a center defined by the Sun's position in the sky and some lag. For simplicity I assume that there's a low pressure band on the equator, which might shift a bit, but is fairly long.

The Sun's orbit moves during the year, like mentioned: it shifts towards the north, then center, then south, then center again, depending on the tilting of the sky dome (which raises the edge so much that primordial light gets in from the Outside and causes lit summer evenings and nights sans the presence of the Sun). The world is fairly wet, and dryness is caused by south-west mountain ranges that cast a rain-shadow towards the center.

The big exception, for which I tried to come up with a good rationalisation, is the obligatory Huge Desert. On Māinm it lies on the East coast, where it faces the Sun as it rises. Why is it desert, while the western islands are fairly wet? Here comes to the excuse: it's because the ocean around where the Sun rises is really, really hot, and forms a constant low pressure area with which the east coast desert areas can't compete with: the winds in this area are characterised as seaward winds, and the northerly and southerly winds that would otherwise bring in rain are exhausted by the two conveniently placed mountain ranges. There are occasionally westerlies bringing rain, but usually they fall on the hills and the dry plains on the way. I should add more mountains there, though, I guess.

Why is the Ocean there really hot? Well, that's a result of the bizarre origin of Māinm ocean currents caused by Maelstrom at the center of the world (not the winds, though because they're usually centerwards, they help in the west while maybe hindering a bit in the east) . Like in my earlier posts, water is pulled towards the center, but there is no obvious route from the East coast towards the center, so the currents have to circle around the continent, which is why the east is generally hotter than the west, which is in turn cooled by the cold currents coming from the south and north.

I got a bit lucky here in that with a bit of handwaving and tactical rationalisation my original ad-hoc plans seem to have gelled together quite well.

[Naeddyr]

someone else post in this thread, i'm embarrassing myself with these self-bumps

Anyhow, here's a small digression to typography, writing and stuff. For the meta-setting of this game/world, I've been devising small flavour points: one of them is the typography associated with them. Typographical variation is a cheap way to create exoticism or otherness, or just give something a particular vibe: like, say, if you made a Britannic style story or game, you might use Uncial or Insular (for Celtic) or Old English typographic styles, with yoghs and dots. For this stuff, I decided to create a small variant of Latin, with which I intend to write names in the codelang deviced for this, and other language snippets other than Meta-English. As a base for the design I raster-edited on glyph samples from a Open Font License font named Sorts Mill Goudy by Barry Schwartz:

The plan is to take the modifications here, turn it into a separate font to use in the game (alongside standard SM Goudy, though the game SDK I'm using also handles bitmap fonts, which would be simpler), and license it with credits and all that stuff in the Open Font License.

For those who don't know, /ŋ/ means the velar nasal sound you get at the end of "sing". The n-with-a-hook is a letter for that sound (in IPA, and in the above Latin variant because ŋ is a bitch to invent a new letter for, as you can see). The letter that looks like n-with-a-j and a dot is just an abbreviation/ligature standing for "ja", 'and' in the codelang of the game (which is, as said, based on modern Finnish (ok, I lie, Old Finnish - I presume that most sound-changes that cause irregularity in modern Finnish do not take place) with a set of sound-changes that turns modern Finnish into something that doesn't resemble modern Finnish, because this is a really simple way to create a flavour-language without actually doing any proper conlanging (and which anyone with basic knowledge of Finnic diachronical linguistics and etymology can easily use). I've also played with the thought of doing an English-based codelang. We'll see how that goes. Maybe I'll do something with reversed-English, plus some sound-changes to fudge things.

Anyhow, today I decided to play around with my ink-pen in lieu of anything productive (I'm suffering from a slight cold), and decided to design a miniscule style to write this in.

Apologies for the unfocused shot, I can't seem to get any decent pictures with my old camera.
Still a work on progress, though I'm fairly happy with the look. It's old-fashioned looking, but not in any particular sense of old-fashioned: a mixture of different styles, some original strokes, and all in all it looks quite suitable for use on a fantasy map. I might try to digitise this to use on my map.

Lastly, a small update with further elaboration on climes and ocean currents.