New Town

[Hoel]

I don't like it, it looks too bunched up and the emboss is wrong.
When i did the fields in my burgenos map, i put down some brown shapes of the field and then i selected them, contracted the selection by 1 px and drew separate lines with a brush set to alter size and hue a bit, and some spacing, in a new layer.
If you want to try, I could make a short tut.

[Steel General]

I'm kind of on the fence regarding your latest changes to the fields. Looks great zoomed out, but when zoomed into full resolution it's almost to much 'bumpiness' - maybe try shrinking the size of the bevel or something?

[CBDroege]

I think the bumpy fields distract from the rest of the work, and take the focus away from the town.

[landorl]

On to the next plan. I am trying something a little bit different for the fields now. I have only done the yellowish colored fields, but wanted to get some feedback. I have basically done some brush strokes instead of just filling the area. Let me know if that looks a little better.[ATTACH]Village - Osterdat.jpg[/ATTACH]

[Gandwarf]

Better, but the fields still draw the eye (instead the town should, I think).
Part of the problem might also be the size of the fields. Some of the fields are bigger than the town itself. Such large, colored areas tend to draw the eye.

[Hoel]

The texture scale is still a problem. You should scale it down a bit..

[Nytmare]

Scaled down and more subtle. Maybe you should wander around a bunch of aerial photograps of different fields so you can see how little the detail is that you're trying to recreate.

http://images.google.com/images?um=1...=Search+Images

http://images.google.com/images?um=1...ial+wheatfield

http://images.google.com/images?um=1...q=aerial+crops

I'm also wondering if it makes sense for everyone to have fenced off yards like that. Especially in a situation like this where each person's yard means that much more wasted space that everyone has to defend. I've always assumed that that concept of personal space is pretty modern. Id imagine everybody being much closer packed together with the only fences inside the walls being a corral of some kind.

The farms do seem to be large compared to the size of the fort, but that's only my gut reaction. Does anyone know the basic math involved in the ratio needed of farmland to living space? That'd be a handy thing to have.

What kind of scale are we looking at here, about how many people do you have living in those houses?

[landorl]

From what I have read, it takes a lot of farmland to support a village. In medieval times they generally had 1/3 of their fields laying fallow each season. 1 acre will produce about 8-12 bushels of wheat, and it will take somewhere around 100 bushels to support a person for a year, so a family of 5 will need 10 - 30 acres of farmland.

The reason that I have fenced off each house within the village is that for a dark age village, they would also have some animals living with them. I have seen some drawings where they had woven fences between the houses. I don't know how accurate those are though.

[Gandwarf]

The reason that I have fenced off each house within the village is that for a dark age village, they would also have some animals living with them. I have seen some drawings where they had woven fences between the houses. I don't know how accurate those are though.

I am not sure it's accurate, but I do know people used to keep cattle in their houses.

Oh, and about the size of the fields: it might be realistic, but sometimes it's better to be unrealistic. As long are you are not going for a realistic map of course.