Palladium WIP

[Midgardsormr]

I have quite a few Palladium Fantasy books, myself. They released a second edition a few years back, so there must still be a decent number of players. I loved the Cthulhuesque Old Ones backstory, and I still go back to those naval combat rules for other games. Palladium also published some top-notch reference material that I try to always keep around. The two weapons compendiums are probably some of the only dead-tree books I'm going to hang onto as I convert the rest of my library to digital. Speaking of which, there are some decent castle plans in the fantasy weapons book; I may dig that out tonight and refresh myself on them.

This is looking like a pretty good start, although I'll probably have a bit more to say when you get to the labels and icons stage. The only critique I have at the moment is that it looks like it lacks anti-aliasing. Maybe that's just a result of a resize, though?

[arsheesh]

This is looking like a pretty good start, although I'll probably have a bit more to say when you get to the labels and icons stage. The only critique I have at the moment is that it looks like it lacks anti-aliasing. Maybe that's just a result of a resize, though?

Huh, I didn't resize the map, and when I clicked the map link on it I wasn't quite sure what you were referring to, perhaps I'm missing something. So this isn't so much of an update as me just playing around. I came up with an alternate version of this map in a different style. Don't know what the client will think (they requested my Eriond style), so this may not make the cut, but I thought I'd display it for comments and critique anyway. I'm not sure if I've made the "stylized" land glow too bright or not, any thoughts?

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Midgardsormr]

Huh, I didn't resize the map, and when I clicked the map link on it I wasn't quite sure what you were referring to, perhaps I'm missing something.

I'm not sure I can express this very well, so bear with me. Anti-aliasing softens the transition between contrasting pixels, and it allows details smaller than four pixels in area to integrate more successfully into their surroundings. It has the overall effect of reducing the digital look of a raster image, as well as smoothing out very fine details. In this particular image, there are places where the rivers are showing artifacts from being too small. This is a very tiny snippet from your map that illustrates what I'm talking about:



See how the bevel's highlight is choosing alternating pixels to light up? If the river were bigger, the highlight would be continuous. Anti-aliasing slightly modifies the color of the pixels that the highlight covers only partially, giving the illusion that it and the river are continuous, even though the individual pixels may be neither color.

In fact, there is some anti-aliasing occurring in this image, but the details are so fine that it cannot do much without turning the entire thing into mush.