Critique: Archipelago Nation

[arakish]

Thanks for all the critiques. I have not settled on any placement for the islands. I am also still debating on whether to go volcanic or tectonic piling type islands. And definitely the rivers need more work. A lot more work.

The major difference is that tectonic piled islands tend to be nothing more than one giant piece of rock and have very little arable land. However, some can have large amounts of arable land, but they tend to have little. Volcanic islands, although they can have some steep mountains, they do tend to level out as you approach the water and do have more arable land.

ravells,
I used ArcMap while at work over the weekend to create the colored elevation, hillshade, contours (not shown), and river flow layers. ArcMap is still too expensive for me to afford. I then brought all the layers home and did some doctoring with Photoshop.

Lukc,
You could be right on the rivers and *large* islands. I am not setting any scale. That will be up to my friend. I told him I would make a large map, but he would have to decide on the scale. Currently, I am making the map to print 20in x 10in if printed with a 300dpi.

waldronate,
Yeah, I know that. But I wanted to give the islands a slightly different look than the real world equivalents.

Furthermore, I am going to look into all the different HF editors I have while at home and see about generating islands not of the Earth. IIRC, doesn't Wilbur have some tesselation island making tutorial?

Again, thanks for all the critiques.

rmfr

[arakish]

May have been a while since I posted here, but I am still working on the map. I discussed it with my friend, telling him all of your feedback. He decided not to go with the shaded relief. Especially after I discussed with him how difficult it can be to generate appropriate heightfields. Actually, how long it could take to fish for appropriate heightfields. He then decided to leave it to me.

I have decided to try my hand at a hand-drawn style of map. Once I had the lay of the map the way he wanted it, it ended up too large to post here (at I think it is). The map is 4000px by 6000px by 1,687,969 bytes. Here is the link: Ionen Dor.

My friend actually wants the map to be labeled in an alien language the characters will not know. In other words, I am going to have to make two maps, one with alien text, the other with English. Attached is an image with some fonts I have. This is not all the alien text fonts I have, only the ones I wanted. I wanted it to at least appear hand written, but yet alien. Too many other alien text fonts I have look too close like printed text.

My question: Which do y'all like the best?

Listing from top down, the fonts are:

1. Atlantean
2. AutoREALM Futhark
3. Bacata
4. Dark Arts
5. Galach
6. Guild
7. JSL Tencton
8. Leviathan
9. Minbari2
10. Runes The Elder Scroll
11. Wizard Speak
12. Wizard Speak Worn

Thanks, for the C&C.

rmfr