From: darshan
Date: 2002-02-11 00:03:14
The world map has to be redone almost from scratch. The only thing we can preserve of it is the continent outlines.
Why?
Firstly, as has been long since acknowledged, the rivers are plotted completely wrong. Water always flows the path of least resistance, and rivers cannot branch. But this is peanuts compared to the big one.
The terrain designation is completely ridiculous.
We have grasslands, plains, lowlands and prairie. As terrain these are all one and the same. Likewise for mountains, hills and highlands, all of which have also separate terrain designations. The difference between
lowlands and plains is that lowlands are low. That's done
with a heightmap, not with terrain designation. The difference between prairie and plains is that, well, there isn't one. Why they are separate is beyond my imagination.
Make your own conclusions.
From: namhas
Date: 2002-02-11 12:36:48
In-Reply-To: 662
I've been thinking about the same thing. Yes, it needs to be redone with proper terrain types. Perhaps first step would be to produce a list of these terrain types we want? The map was initially made for a MUD with no heightmap and as it was made for MUD we needed to have separate "plains" and "prairie" terrain types to have more interesting descriptions.
From: yorkaturr
Date: 2002-02-11 15:03:00
In-Reply-To: 662
Once we determine the terrain types we will need, we can just bucket fill some areas in a paint program to abide with our new types. No biggie here.
From: Archantes
Date: 2002-02-11 15:00:32
In-Reply-To: 670
How about classification like this:
* Mountains
* Tundra
* Fir wood
* Hardwood forest
* Sands
* Savanna
* Dry veldt
* Area of winter rains (aka mediterranean climate)
* Tropical rainforest
These are more like climates but like this we can start to build actual terrain types.
Any others? Should something be removed or splitted?
From: raeky
Date: 2002-02-11 16:37:49
In-Reply-To: 672
i propse that the new map be done in adobe illustrator, so for ease of editing and quality it provides.
From: hook
Date: 2002-02-11 19:11:00
In-Reply-To: 677
i propse that the new map be done in adobe illustrator, so for ease of editing and quality it provides.
what??Gimp works fine same with photoshop or any other image manipulation program. Why should we limit ourselves to only one program to generate a .png or .gif? Do you own stock in adobe or something?
From: raeky
Date: 2002-02-11 19:14:54
In-Reply-To: 680
because you can edit vector art MUCCH faster and easier to edit in illustrator, also you can zoom in and the lines remain crisp and clear, and it can be exported into any graphic format. But it does limit you to use a windows or mac os. Yet again unix is only good for servers not graphic art. :P
From: darshan
Date: 2002-02-11 19:36:44
In-Reply-To: 682
FWIW, there's a free Linux vector prog called Sketch which handles .ai, .pdf and .svg files. So we don't need to get into dollarware at all.
From: raeky
Date: 2002-02-11 22:13:49
In-Reply-To: 682
only problem with vector art is its kinda time consumeing to convert a picture into the art. But if your redoing the entire map stuff (not landmasses but the biomasses), then all you'd have to do is outline the old landmasses, then go in and add more detail, with a vector art you can make it very detailed if you zoom in, so one map could have all the detail of individual area maps.
From: raeky
Date: 2002-02-11 22:11:07
In-Reply-To: 683
yay :)
see another reason to use vector art, you can use it on unix too.. heh
does it export .pdf?
