ViewingDale Questions

[Redrobes]

Hi Kasim, Gosh lots of questions there to pick up. What I did yesterday is mail a few people here to ask if I could use their maps to make a demo. I have had several responses with an ok. So I went ahead and did it. I hope that its ok with the others and if not I will remove the link.

I have made a movie showing what its basically all about. So I have taken RobA's progressive detail world maps which show how you might get the basic forms in at world scale. Then lower down there is Tareth and Landorl's maps to shoe mid range detail. Then I took Hapimeses city and Simonutp's tower to show smaller scale stuff and then I added some more tokens at human scale.

Link to Video

Most players should be able to play this but if you have issues then I would recommend VLC. Oh and there is no sound on it.

For those interested it was made with CamStudio and MediaCoder.

[Redrobes]

Here is a demo using Tareths map with the diamond contours.

Link to Video

What I have done is make a clear icon. You use these a lot. They are useful for grouping child icons together. I am using the pathing tool too. That drops icons down where the mouse travels with adjustable parameters like tracking and random rotations. In this instance its set up for rotating them based on mouse direction. So it drops contours where the diamonds point along perpendicular to the contour. Finally I am showing the effect of child cut off where the size of child icons can be shown and when they are faded out.

Once all of the diamonds are on their own clear icon as a parent then the following apply. When the parent clear icon is off of the screen then the app does not even consider the diamonds. So when the mountain is off screen it plays no part in slowing down the map. Also when the parent clear icon is too small and is itself faded out then all the grand children like the diamonds are not considered too. So when looking at the whole world all those diamonds are not slowing it down. Therefore only when you are looking at that area and at a scale that they would be seen is when the program draws them. By that reasoning you can have a lot of stuff on the map providing its grouped into levels that are of similar scale and similar position. I.e you parent people to houses, houses to cities, cities to regions, regions to continents and continents to worlds etc. If you parent all people to the entire world then its going to run very slow (Which is the way the majority of other mapping programs work !)

[Kasim]

Wow, that just makes me want to see more..

I have made a movie showing what its basically all about. So I have taken RobA's progressive detail world maps which show how you might get the basic forms in at world scale. Then lower down there is Tareth and Landorl's maps to shoe mid range detail. Then I took Hapimeses city and Simonutp's tower to show smaller scale stuff and then I added some more tokens at human scale.

That's pretty much what I'm hoping to do, but I'll be aiming for no seams. If I do all the detail in VD, I'm thinking that it'll work out. Can you see any problems created by doing something like his city in all VD icons instead of an imported image? I'll just need to create an invisible parent to place them on, correct?

[Redrobes]

That's pretty much what I'm hoping to do, but I'll be aiming for no seams. If I do all the detail in VD, I'm thinking that it'll work out. Can you see any problems created by doing something like his city in all VD icons instead of an imported image? I'll just need to create an invisible parent to place them on, correct?

Yes thats right, remember everything is a branch on a big tree. So don't try to group everything all on one twig. Make a street in clear parent, put some houses on it. Attach the clear parent to the city base map. When the clear street is off of the side then no houses need to be drawn. I knew a movie would explain it a little better.

IMO to do full seamless I would still use bitmaps to do base terrain. Keep it simple and get the basic shapes in using that, keep to a limited palette. Then it will fit together ok. There are some extra functions within the app for helping a little there too. Once you have the thing all mapped out to a really basic level then you can get the app to make a new icon out of a screen image. It will get all the scale right and then you can attach that new icon back into the place it came from. Now editing this smaller area you can add stuff to it until you have that area done in patch icons / splats / new artwork etc. Then you can replace the image of the basic map to clear and it will be a clear parent sitting on the base map at the correct scale etc. Thats a more advanced technique but thats basically how you do it.

BTW. I have just made and uploaded the icon08 demo. Do you want to test that out say Monday evening ? You can grab that :-

ViewingDale iCon08 demo app

Email me with a time. Say 23:00 by the tycho clock maybe or whatever you have free.

Edit -- I should add that time should be UTC (so many timezones...). Also on my forum and the four ugly monsters there are the details of the iCon08 Ventrilo server settings. If your able then get a headset and mic and you can talk. We can do it by chat but its not so easy with the type lag.

[Badger]

Well.. I've ordered it .. I think everyone else should do the same

[Torq]

Very cool Redrobes. So what this means for a project like the Cartographer's Guild world mapping project suggested in another thread, is the higher your resolution the better?

Torq

[Redrobes]

So what this means for a project like the Cartographer's Guild world mapping project suggested in another thread, is the higher your resolution the better?

Thanks,

The more detail and res the images are the further you can zoom in to them. The usual way to create the world is to start at the top and do continents and detail them right in. Then go down and do it all again and so on until you hit cities and then make a fully detailed city map. The thing is that if you start with houses or the city then when you do the region the app can fill in the city for you. then as the region gets detailed the continent starts getting done for you etc. So whilst its true that its good to have detail, it might not be the best strategy to put the effort into to making every map wildly detailed. Better to put the effort in at battle scale and let the app do the work for you. Also, all the upper scales get modified automatically when you change the lower detail.

Its like a sculpture. You start with a blank block. You wouldn't chip off the top corner and detail all that in right away. You rough it out and then progressively work on it.

Another thing thats worth bearing in mind also is that you can reuse branches in the mapping tree. So if you make a fantastically detailed inn for one city, you can clone that and use it again - or even bits of it again. It takes no more storage to do it. The app gives you either option of having each of them unique or you can use exactly the same icon so that if you change one then the other gets modified also. So you might want to change the name label and the characters within but tie up the basic layout. Thats handy for generic villages or basic houses when somebody creates a new icon - like those Persian rugs for example recently. One quick mod and every generic house in the world gets a new rug. Of course you do have to be a bit careful when editing a global generic / template icon.