WIP -My first attempt at making a map

[Philobytes]

so here is my map so far: I'd appreciate some comments and criticisms

[Maraxus_]

Good start.
The most important point is, imho, that the coastlines feel natural, you found the right mix of rough coasts and coast-near island groups and smooth ocean shores. The mountain ranges look fine, the tectonics seam okay. - Only the mountain over the water bridge in the central east part of the map looks wiered, I don't like right angles in mountain ranges, but than again tectonics, shore and mountain lines are quite chaotic and there are places on earth, that do actually look weired, somewhere on a planed unlikely formations are going to appear, so that's okay, too.

Climate zones are more problematic: You "forgot" the tropic belt. There is just subtropics around your equator, temperate climate around that and then the polar caps. if you did this willingly (temperate zones are the sweet sports for the most interesting political and cultural parts, so making them bigger than likely is a good thing), than it's okay. But reasonably, the part in the middle of the map would probably look like Brazil at least, the southern coast of the inner sea north would border desert where there is the middle green now and the southeast continent would have more savanah-like climate between the mountain ranges (maybe, the mountains there could result in strangeness)

Style: It's a start. The color composition looks good but the textures are not exactly a harmonic map. But I'm not the best to give advices here.

And a very special point :

File Format: Really? BMP? Use png, if you don't like jpegs.

[Azélor]

Your map could be a lot bigger if you save it in jpeg. PNG is only good if you have transparency, otherwise with a map like this you end up with a file 8 to 10 times bigger if you save in PNG or BMP.

What said Maraxus is true, your usually have dense forest at the equator but that mostly depend on the wind direction. Look at Somalia, it's arid despite that it sits on the equator.
And then you would have desert around the tropics but exeptions are possible.

[Philobytes]

I noticed after posting that I forgot to include a description - oops. So the world is a pangaea type (based off a pangaea map I found online) and it is generally earthlike (so far) except that it has an axial tilt of 29 degrees. From some sites I found in researching and some commentary on the net, I tried to make the interiors more desert like and the coastal areas are the jungles, as far as bmp vs jpeg - i noticed that jpeg messed up the colors when exporting it that way. I'm using fractal mapper 8 and this is my first full map using it. so it was interesting to go through it and make the map as a type of tutorial for making maps, but still some things i need to learn how to do.

[Philobytes]

So it's been a while and I apologize for that, but I started to look at my map again and made some changes based on your analysis which I do appreciate.

Good start.
The most important point is, imho, that the coastlines feel natural, you found the right mix of rough coasts and coast-near island groups and smooth ocean shores. The mountain ranges look fine, the tectonics seam okay. - Only the mountain over the water bridge in the central east part of the map looks wiered, I don't like right angles in mountain ranges, but than again tectonics, shore and mountain lines are quite chaotic and there are places on earth, that do actually look weired, somewhere on a planed unlikely formations are going to appear, so that's okay, too.

I also really didn't like the middle mountains, but my tectonics seemed to indicate it, but I took it out and added a forested area instead. sort of like panama.

Climate zones are more problematic: You "forgot" the tropic belt. There is just subtropics around your equator, temperate climate around that and then the polar caps. if you did this willingly (temperate zones are the sweet sports for the most interesting political and cultural parts, so making them bigger than likely is a good thing), than it's okay. But reasonably, the part in the middle of the map would probably look like Brazil at least, the southern coast of the inner sea north would border desert where there is the middle green now and the southeast continent would have more savanah-like climate between the mountain ranges (maybe, the mountains there could result in strangeness)

Yes I see your point, in looking at it, I kind of thought it might be like Utah/Nevada, so there is some desert in the middle and some savannah on the edges. I added in a rainforest as well. A not on the names, I picked some names of places that represent my thoughts - not final names. I just thought it might sound somewhat better than desert1, forest2, etc.

File Format: Really? BMP? Use png, if you don't like jpegs.

This is a jpg export from the program. not really liking the way it exported. as I said I'm using Fractal mapper and sort of new to it and graphics programs. So anyways I would love to see what you guys think.