Ryandor.com

Hi,
I'm designing a new map, and can't really decide which terrain to paint where. I want it to be realistic. And I want to hear everyone's opinions before painting. I labeled some areas with numbers for you to describe your opinions about my map. I'm thinking of 5 cities ATM. Capital at 1, Medium sized cities at 3 and 6, an outpost (like cove) at 2 and a small city (for PKs) at 12. Please examine my map and think about the places you love on the original map. And tell me what you think.

Beautiful coastlines. Looks like the start of a great map.
I would go with that, and a good sized outpost at 8 maybe, as a kind of crossroads between your 3 major citys. Possibly also something at 11.

I'm thinking major mountain range across 5/7, and area 10.

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nice coastline, but as stormcrow said, don't forget to place some big sized landscape areas at 10 and so.

YEAH MAN BRONX YEAH

Very nice work!

I also agree with StormCrow and Matonor, it will need more "filling". I just tested a player run shard that was very nice other than the really huge open areas with "nothing" in them other than grass and a few trees...that will get old quick.

Its very easy to lose perspective while map making.

Dev

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"So...if crazy people don't know their crazy...does that mean your only sane if your know your crazy?"

thank you
i spent 6 hours to coastlines, editing them pixel by pixel, to make em look realistic. i think i'm gonna paint mountains between 7 and 5, and 10. seems the best thing to do.. since Mod11 messes up with jungles and swamps, i'm thinking of no jungles and swamps. maybe a little sandy area inside mountains near area 10, accessed via roads. all the grassy area will be at 0 to 6 random heights and forests. crossroads idea is superb, surely gonna implement it. also a city to ice isle.. stone theme with snows, it's gonna be real good.

the pain is i'm gonna waste days with orbsydia wf to make it perfect.. can't wait to get to city building stage.

As others have said, VERY nice map so far. The coatlines are excellent.

As far as what to put in the "middle" I'd definitely go with Stormcrow's suggestion on an outpost/small city/towm in the vicinity of 8, with cities at 1, 3, and 5 (or 6)

Also along with a strip of mountains I'd go with a "think" forest area around the river/lake area or lower along the coast of the bay leading to it if you can fit it as well.

A beach would be nice around 2 maybe.

I'm sure no matter how you lay it out, it'll be good. You've already got a good start on what looks to be an excellent map. Keep up the good work.

-Ryandor

See? Your map is good, even Ry got off his ass to post something

What problems with jungles and swamps? Do tell so I can fix.
I am not aware of any problems with my swamp scripts. Uhmmmm.....you did make them like so?



Swamp , surrounded by moss , surrounded by grass.

Jungle aside from issues with the wretched 3d client, which I can't see using for too many reasons to list here, I am not aware of any other problems with; except the fact that because of the size of the trees item placer sometimes puts them too far into the next group.

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i made a test map for with a small jungle and swamp.



Swamps are perfect, my mistake before, i was painting moss area thinner before i saw your screenshot, transitions were edgy.



But jungles missing some items in transitions with grass. Since i'm going to edit NW coasts, mountain tops and some sand/rock transitions i was thinking of no jungles. there may be an easy way around, i'm still too unexperienced about making maps.

i read your " how to make osi-like mountains" storm, i think i longer need to edit mountain tops with WF, since they are great with mod11 too.



scary.
but i need to improve my tecnic thats for sure :p

Yeah, half of the battle is learning how to make Dragon do a better job at all it can do. The other half is learning how to use the damn thing. I think we are all still perfecting our technique here.

A very important thing with making thin areas, they MUST be 2 tiles wide at ALL places. What this means for most of us using our lassos and magic wands is that we have to make the area 3 tiles wide so that the corners are 2 tiles. I'm still looking for a better way, as there are a lot of instances where I only want that 2 tiles of transitional area and nothing more.


Can you be more specific? I'll try to do some tests today. I did quite a bit of fooling around with the jungle scripts at some point, because I remember I wasn't happy with them. It is possible that I put the wrong scripts in the package (like I did with the coasts), I'll have to doublecheck.

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i posted an image showing "UNUSED" items at grass-jungle transitions

Hmmmm....dunno why I missed that. My current jungle scripts are giving me similar, except it's just black instead of no-draw. I'll look into them.

How is this map progressing anyway?

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This space for rent.

I'm improving the landscape everyday, little by little, also a friend of mine is helping me on building and decorating the cities.

also I turned the project into a shard - http://www.corbeau.gen.tr/
the site is in Turkish only atm, but will be in different languages asap.

my speciality in uo (:p) is scripting actually, so custom map and custom scripting will look good i guess. :)

I will post some overview of the current progress shortly :)