Plausible Distances & Populations

[Karro]

Hmm. At this level of bumpiness, the very-smooth looking coasts are kind of out-of-place looking. Can you fractalize these coasts a little more using similar methods?

[Sigurd]

Karro - I know what you mean. Problem is the file is eventually an overlay for a bigger world image. I keep the coastline to help me orient the files. I think I'm going to leave the coastline the way it is. I have a game to prepare for.

I've included small versions of the player files. The masked file is what the players have seen as they traveled along the river. They have visited areas 1 to 4 and are now exploring 4.

Now I'm going to use my scale to draw a new encounter area of a much smaller region around area 4. I know that 1 mile = 30 pixels on the big map. (Like to say I planned that but it was a welcome fluke.)

I think the next set of maps should be 2 miles high by 3 miles wide. So I'm going to make a box on a new layer. I use the Marquee tool to draw a square (approx size) and then stroke it with 1 pixel. Then I'm going to transform that box into a shape precisely 60 pixels high and 90 pixels wide.

Then just for ease later I make a new layer inside the square and use the same process to draw a white box 3 pixels high and 30 pixels long. Then I copy that box, shrink it to 15 pixels long and colour it black. I place the new scale inside my view box and then link it to the frame.

I now have a little window I can float around my big map and look for likely encounter areas. I touch up the area around 4 and decide on an area.

See screen cap. (Notice how my dpi setting is beginning to make things blocky)

Now I can find any area of my big map. Copy the file to a new name and then crop out everything that isn't in my frame. I could copy but If I crop I keep the layers separate and keep my options open.

Sigurd

[Sigurd]

This is the new starting point for the local encounters. The images are not pretty but they are a lot better beginnings than nothing at all.

I take the very small image and multiply it by something I'll remember. In this case 500%. If I want to try and reintroduce items to the big map I can shrink them to 20% for an approximate. (In practice this is not always feasible but I like to keep my options open. The new square is taken from the tiny 3x2 mile box on the larger image. I'll leave the encounter area locked and invisible on the larger picture file, just in case..

[Karro]

Karro - I know what you mean. Problem is the file is eventually an overlay for a bigger world image. I keep the coastline to help me orient the files. I think I'm going to leave the coastline the way it is. I have a game to prepare for.
Sigurd

Hmm.

Maybe there's insufficient time, given your game-time needs, but one thought I had was: make sure you mark where the coasts go off the map (and join the larger image of the worldmap), then fractalize the coast using whatever method works best (something that uses the existing coast as it's primary basis, of course), then go back and manually fix up the edges of the coast to make sure it will stay flush with the larger images.

[Sigurd]

I took the tiny selection from my larger map and multiplied it by 20.

(If you crop a selection watch your placed files - they don't get cropped. My tiny map was 2.6 gig in size after only being multiplied by 4!. I had to rasterize and crop the extraneous files and my file x20 is 71mg)

So after looking at a couple of other files - a peaceful village without fortifications is about 250' in diameter. This does not include fields etc...


Here is my new map with the space for the village as a square in pink. That's not one house it's 250' square. 1 mile = 5280 feet

You can see that what I essentially have is a second local 'regional' map. Things would be too small for an illustration here. The physical layer indicates a ridge to the west of the town and then a depression. I think that depression will be a river for the town and the ridge will have some sort of fortification. Its pretty obvious that this detail would be way too small for my earlier maps.

Just looking at the space. I might be able to fit as many as 3 villages in this space. I probably have to reintroduce some trees and hedge rows to the smaller map.



Sigurd

[Sigurd]

So I take a new cropping centered on my town (250 ft) and reconstruct the scale.

I multiplied the last zoom factor by 10 to work on it (making my scale 1 x 20 x10 or 200 times the original section from the first map. The selection I'm including here is 1/4 size (for space reasons) so you can consider it 50 times the size of the original selection.

As you can see its still not ideal for detail of the village but its appropriate to illustrate the general relationship of things. The relationship of town and fortification, river, and fields are clear. Now I need to clean this up and have 2 detail maps, Town & Fortification/Docks

With a bit of refinement, we have our first player map. A relational map for the Valley of Loln. In the attachment you can see the numbered sites in the valley. 1. the keep 2. the south bridge 3. the north bridge 4. the Town itself. 5 a secondary fort and 6 a keep for a competing noble.

Using our standard ration of 2 high to 3 wide, the maps are now 500' high and 750' wide. I have a couple of possible maps to do.

Sigurd

[Sigurd]

I'm wondering if my little maps aren't too small...


Anyway. Here's a really cool site for anyone who's read this far .

http://www.qub.ac.uk/urban_mapping/index.htm

[Ascension]

Interesting project there. I wonder if they had people move in and live there permanently like this one show I used to watch about the early American colonists (don't remember the name of the show at the moment).

[Sigurd]

So I am having problems with the city at this scale. My plan was originally to have an estate in the north east and the city in the SW. Too little room for the estate and the city is looking very village like. The biggest building here is no more than about 30' at its largest measurement. Still I should be able to make this scale work.

This is actually a very intimate scale for buildings and neighborhoods. On the bright side I'm learning to use brushes for colouring the roofs. On the down side the ground layer is far too basic and noisy without being very responsive to the way people are using the land.

Its a WIP.

Sigurd.

[Asharad]

Wow, I'm impressed!