Turn Any Image Into Map

[wazawak]

On the "Features" list, it says that you can turn any image into a map. That intrigues me. How can I do this?

[Aezeal]

I can only think of just loading it in a program that can save it as a file the game can use for maps.. and then do the white dots needed for the game to recognize provinces and bright red lines to mark borders...

I'd more work than you'd think though

[Gandalf Parker]

There are a couple of people working to make it easier. But in the simplest sense...
If you load an image of Madonna into a paint program, remove all COMPLETELY white pixels (255, 255, 255) which is usually done just by makng them a light grey. Then put the tiniest possible white dot in each location that would be a "flag" when you played it. Then you can load that image into the Map Editor in the Tools part of Dominions and have it generate a .map file for it.

The results would be bad.
But yes its possible. Usually its better to choose a decent image (like a sattelite photograph of Europe?), add borders, then the dots, and reasonable neighbor connections.

[Endoperez]

Even the borders aren't necessary. The map editor in game tools is quite bad at guessing correct neighbours, and very bad without red borders, but you can just assign neighbours manually if you have to.

[Agrajag]

My RMG in progress will be able to take an image and turn it into a map, but unless you supply it with an image and it's own "format" for storing per-pixel terrain bitmasks, it will only be able to plonk down random provinces and provinces and connect them (so some polygon over Madonna's nose might be deep sea, while another that contains her left earlobe would be a mountainous forest).
Though I haven't made much progress on it for the last couple of days because I'm a bit sick

[chrispedersen]

Why does this conjure images of a lower GI track...

Oh yes.. for our next move, we're going to invade the colon...