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Very very promising,
Perhaps you should extend the snow a little beyond the castle walls as the real weather asserts itself? You might extend it little further in the walls shadow or stretched by the prevailing winds.
I wonder what the affects of condensation would be if warm air the castle all summer?
Thats easily the most successful unnatural winter that I can think of in any map.
Good job.
Sigurd
What I see is that the "barn" furthest east has a darker shadow than the other buildings and you've got some tiling in the south where the land meets the water. I'm not the scale police so I don't really care so long as it all holds together upon completion, even if it means changing the scale when done...I do that all the time. So far it looks pretty good though so I can't wait to see it finished.
OK, here's an update on this here beastie...taking into account the comments, etc. I have received so far, here is what I updated.
1) Completely redid the 'waterfront/docks' - rather than using pre-rendered building images, I went for the basic building shape w/texture look. The texture needs to be re-worked as it is not seamless, but that's not a big deal.
2) Added some more houses, taverns/inns, etc. that expand out from the docks.
3) Re-worked the 'frost/ice/snow' effect on the temple complex and expanded it out beyond the walls slightly. Also added some additional tents.
4) Added some interior structure to castle/keep (northern part of map)
5) Added an experimental small farm, just north of the docks. Particularly interested in opinions/comments on this as to whether it 'works' or not.
6) Tried to clean-up some tiling near the coastline(s)
As always C&C is welcomed, encouraged, dreaded (just kidding :D) etc.
Have to say that the farm doesn't 'work' for me, but the idea is decent. The field is just too rigid and "clean" I think.
You know it just occurred to me that the ice temple could make some serious coinage by selling ice to the taverns and fisheries down stream and it would be easy to transport too. In fact, they could even hold the down stream docks hostage by damming up the river behind a big wall of ice and threatening to unleash it all at once if a proper "tribute" wasn't paid. :shock:
The buildings are a little better, but I think what might make them work even better is to sharpen the terrain more. The terrain is blurred so much that it has a sort of hazy softness to it that contrasts with the crisp sharpness of the buildings.
The road through the field is clever, but I am not sure it works, the part on the inside of the road looks at points to be too narrow to be worth much effort, especially as the part on the outside of the road isn't really closed in by anything except the field edge.
At the range the map needs to be viewed at the frost effects look great, up close they seem a bit off, but I wouldn't mess with it. I often forget that the players will be looking at this without being zoomed in and try to over cook things myself.
The whole crops/field thing was a bit of an experiment, I wanted to see if the pattern I had downloaded for the field looked any good. I think the concept works, it's just not in the correct place, and as RP said it is a bit 'to clean'. It would probably be better served to be moved a distance outside of the main city, more toward the edges of the map and be a bit less uniform.
I'm still not completely sold on the frost field either, I'll just keep tinkering with it until I get something I can live with without doubting my efforts.
@RPMiller - I never thought about the whole ice thing for taverns, etc. Or even causing an ice dam in the river. The deity the temple complex is dedicated to is a cantankerous bastard who no one outside of his worshipers particularly likes. Having his priests, etc extort the city sounds like something he would want done. Great idea!
I'll look into 'sharpening' up the terrain, can't remember exactly what I did (don't have the file at home), but I may have turned down the opacity a bit to much. More experimenting... yippee!! Ah well, that's half the fun of making these maps.
The pattern on the field looks fine except for the furrows that run vertically and form boxes. Almost always long straight rows from end to end.
That's probably another image that needs to be made into a seamless time, before I use it again...thanks for the input. :)
The field concept is pretty good as are the colors (maybe just a bit more yellow though) but the pattern is so small that it repeats way too much creating that boxey look. The cleaned up tiling along the rocky coast is good now since I didn't see any tiling. This frost does look better as it seems to have a bit of texture. My favorite part of the whole map are the crenelations on the castle towers....how the heck did you do those? Draw it big then shrink it down? It appears, though, that you have some overlapping shadows there creating darker shadows around the towers as compared to the other castle parts. At any rate, still looks pretty good.
Thanks...
The fields are going to need a little more work before I'll be satisfied, I had to shrink the pattern down a lot, otherwise the plants were HUGE! I'll probably drop them out of this map.
Have to admit I "cheated" on the crenelations, they are images from the Dundjinni forums, so I cannot take credit for them. I just added a "toned down" texture to them.
I swapped out the frost texture than added a few more strokes with an airbrush set at around 30-40% opacity. I'm fairly happy with it now, though I'll probably tinker with it some more.
Shadows are always something I struggle with a bit, is it to much, not enough, to dark, to small, to big, etc. etc.