Posts
Lacking extensiveprogramming know-how, I am making my map by hand. I finished most of the inhabited portions
today and I wanted to post a picture.
There is still a great deal to do - I have cities to name, borders to
draw, and chains of arrows to turn into rivers, but for the first time I have a
visual representation of the world in which my characters will play. It is immensely satisfying, to say the least.
I wrote previously
on my methods for creating this map - taking a complete map, obfuscating it
into large chunks, and then decompressing the chunks back into the map - and
now I can talk about how the maps compare.
If you compare the first map to the latest one, you'll notice some
vertical distortions due to mislabeling hexes when I first started. I realized my mistake after 20 hours of work
and decided that I liked the bays and inlets more than the original, flatter
coastline. I think the big difference
between the two maps is that the second one is much less linear (which makes
sense) - terrain is broken up into like chunks instead of radiating lines of
topological features. This was the
objective of the whole process, but what is really nice is the gradation
between the different chunks - while there are some areas that are very
obviously distinct, especially in the southern half of the map, terrain blends
across the chunk borders.
I am happy with the
result, but I doubt I'll do it again. I
had a very specific shape in my head for the Sea of Shadows that I wanted to
realize, which led me to the extensive drafting and mapping process I used. For the other regions that I will make in the
future - Panumbra, the Frozen South, and Guol, I have very few geographic ideas
and so I'll probably just let Alexis' RNG process work its magic.
I feel your map has more character than mine. Not sure why, that's just my gut reaction.
ReplyDeleteI can't speak as to the difference in character, although I do appreciate the compliment. I'd love to see what your map looks like right now - I can only see the sketch from your first map post.
ReplyDeleteOne of the resources I had when first drawing the topographical map that produced the filtering for the random generation was my sister, who is an undergraduate geology major. She helped make the topology curves look realistic, which the first randomization step helped bring out beautifully.