Quote Originally Posted by Rahva View Post
Thanks for the welcome everyone



Well, for example... One of the cities I would really like to have a map for is in the world I posted here.

It's called Hub. It's situated in the middle of a narrow path through a sacred forest. The country, Almin, used to be a number of provinces that were conquered under Almin rule some centuries ago. Before this was the case, Hub was an Almin enclave on foreign soil. This caused many foreign fugitives to run to Hub because their own government's laws did not hold there. That, plus the fact that the 'pass' through the forest is a major trade route, caused the city to grow rather quickly.
However, it is forbidden to cut down the forest, so the city is quite long and narrow.
The trouble with mapping it is that it is also very tall.
In Hub, a single tower can hold several different types of housing or shops, be connected to several bridges or other houses on different levels, be a gate on another level, and so on. There are streets on ground level, high level, and everywhere in between. Generally speaking, the higher your house is, the more prosperous you are.

Long story short, a map of Hub becomes a random cluster of squares and lines pretty quickly. I don't think anybody in Hub itself has a full map of it. Not a good map to start with, methinks
I might try and map one of the other cities first, or one of the little towns around it... So much to do.
Depending on the size, I might create halves or quarters of the city to capture all the detail and all the city. And I'm sure this would end being lots of maps and work to do, but I'd start at the ground level and go up level by level, including all other buildings in the quadrant or other map area.

Depending on the number of floors per building, this could be lots an lots of maps, but it would effectively do the job.

I use Xara Xtreme for all my mapping, but I'm pretty much alone at using it around here... its a raster/vector hybrid drawing program. I do hand-drawn to completely Xara created maps for all my stuff. Another option would be GIMP, the free Image Editor, like Photoshop. Or perhaps Inkscape, which is like Illustrator, but like GIMP, free. Xara is inexpensive, but not free.

GP