an attempt at a city

[LonewandererD]

And the ideas keep flowing.

Here is the plan for my castle, i've already put in new walls and altered some of the old ones, i also removed the roofs off the towers as they felt too european. Anyway, onto the plan. The red areas in the outer area are going to be armouries and barracks while the cream buildings are smithies, fletchers, etc. The red in the inner ring are warehouses and the main entrance to the keep. The dark purple on the walls are going to be extra sections built onto the walls to hold war machines like ballistas, the larger dark purple section on the wall of the inner ring is going to be a fortified gatehouse and the final dark purple section (the largest one) is the base level for the keep. The lighter purple areas are the upper sections of the keep. It's not an overly large keep, only about 3-4 stories, as this is a small city compared to the other clans of the Dal. Finally, white equals roads/courtyards, the cold storage areas have already been put in and the yellow star is going to be a shrine.

I'm holding off doing the keep as I don't have a style in mind for it. Dal architecture is a mix of celtic, oriental japanese and some native american. I want to borrow the "feel" from each of the three cultures without too closely resembling any one of them.

More to come soon.

-D-

[Gidde]

That looks really cool!

[LonewandererD]

Some progress on the castle.

I've put down all of the bases for the areas in the plan and I'm now working on detailing. I've put in new towers on the walls that resemble the larger brown towers (you can see six of these larger towers scattered around the entrance into the bay). I've put in a small archery range and a fenced off sparring area. I've altered the cold storage houses slightly and put the roofs on the warmachine bays along the walls and put the roof on the gatehouse. Next I'm going to be focusing on the main keep and start to really fill in all that empty space lying around. On that note I have a question. This city is noted to be rather peaceful and is bound by an ancient treaty that protects it from attack but also forbids it from raising an army to attack anyone else, so would it be acceptable to have trees and a lot of greenery in the castle grounds as the area would probably not see a lot of major activity? Also, what else can i throw into the castle grounds to fill it out a bit?

More to come soon.

-D-

[LonewandererD]

Castle area complete; at least for now.

I'm now moving onto the cliff area directly opposite the castle, i'm going to put in a few houses, a light house and a lot of trees.

More to come soon.

-D-

[Gandwarf]

Looks great. Wanting to see the whole map together again

[Yandor]

yeah I agree with Gandwarf, still great stuff though! Wish I had the patience for it all =D

[LonewandererD]

Ask and ye shall receive, here is the whole map.

As you can see it is pretty much done, I just have to clean it up, label it (creating one map with English labelling and one map with Dal labelling) and add a decorative border, key and title. But before that, i've still got a few things I want to experiment with, like the dirt roads and water, so I invite all members of the guild to really tear into this map and point anything that seems off that I may have missed, please.

PS: Is the limit on jpgs still 4.77 megabytes? If it is, is there another way of lowering the total data size of my map without having to lower the resolution because, not to sound pretentious or anything, lowering the resolution is hurting my map a bit.

-D-

[tilt]

I unfortunatly don't believe there is any other way. Jpg compress really well, and normal pics you can lower to 60% or even 40% without any great loss. But with crisp images like yours the loss comes a lot faster. But it looks fantastic, really great job, have some rep for that... again you deserve it

[Yandor]

D Thas amazing! I'll pour over it some more, to see if I can find anything (first look throughs everything look good)

[Natai]

This city is absolutely amazing. It makes me both excited and frightened to begin work on the several (gulp) large cities I've got planned. I'll definitely have to look through all the tutorials and play around a bit before I get too involved. If you've got any suggestions or pointers from your experience with this map, I'd love to hear them. What do you wish you had done or setup differently from the start, now that you've made so many little adjustments?

This is another one of those maps that just begs to be printed at poster size and framed. Absolutely gorgeous work! Keep it up, and have some rep!