WIP - Needs Help

[rdanhenry]

The curvature of the roads is odd. If they were running along the easiest route to build with the contours of the land, they'd twist around more. If they were built to be efficient and engineered for speed, they'd go straight. What you have there looks more like a mathematician's graph than a road system. Maybe if non-humans were building the roads, they'd have a reason to do that, but the human preference is generally to go straight if possible (shortest road).

I actually think the mountains and forests are okay, although I would maybe want to see the mountains made darker or colored a little to make them stand out a bit more. You might want to put some foothills along one side of the mountains.

A compass rose would be a nice addition, but a scale is probably more useful. I'm not sure what scale this is actually supposed to be. Is this a continent or an island cluster?

[Goldenrod111]

Thanks for the suggestions, but I'm afraid I won't be able to implement them. I was in the middle of backing up my files (probably shouldn't have stopped midway), and my images have been corrupted as I was working on them today. Luckily, I still have my paper sketch, and wrote down the steps for about the first three-quarters of what I had done, but I don't think I will have anything to put up for a while. I will remember your suggestions and implement them when I redo the map, but I still want to respond to some of them.

Rythal: I love that name link you gave me. The first two posts (and the similar one farther down) strangely seem to be the most helpful to me, and I have copied the templates down and will refer to them when I decide to do my names. I agree with you - those mountains were rather white. I had added a transparent layer over them to give them more color, and it turned out well.

rdanhenry: I want the scale to be rather elastic (I don't write well to certain distances), but it was intended to be a large island - not quite a continent. I found that curved roads looked better than straight ones, but I had straightened them out somewhat and used RobA's fractalize path script to get them looking really good when GIMP crashed. At least I learned something from this: either import the paths in small chunks (I used Inkscape to tweak them), or back up the map before importing them.