Map: Anastasia v1.02 (684-province map)

[Globu]

Very interesting... I'll mess around with some of those effects and see how they look. I can put up images if you or anyone wants to see what it might look like with those effects, and I can certainly put up alternate versions if they actually look decent.


Anyway, a preview of the map is up! The .MAP file is very incomplete (no province names, and only about half designated properly), and I'm still revising some province-marker-pixel locations to better center them, but if anyone wants to download it, take a look at it's essentially final form and give me feedback, it'd be much appreciated!

[Globu]

The essential bits are basically complete, and the map is up in usable form.

What remains is to hand-name provinces, which may take a while, and to set around 30-50 provinces as #start provinces. There will likely be further tweaking for balance and fixes to any mistakes I made as to province designations.

[Globu]

... aaand a question.

How does the game handle the #start listing? I've been going off of the assumption that it basically sets up all start provinces as a pool to randomly select from, and that it hopefully uses some sort of decent way of keeping players from starting in two start provinces simultaneously.

More specifically, if I go wild with #start designations, basically selecting every province on the map with 4 or more neighbors that doesn't have other problems (for example, as shown in the attached image), many of them will be very close together.

Can the game be counted on to be intelligent with this, or must I be more selective and narrow it down to locations that will not allow the game to jam players too close together?

[Ragnarok-X]

I might be hijacking this, but once you create a random map, is there some way to import it into photoshop in order to make it more pretty, just graphics ? I tried importating the .rgb but it didnt work.

[Globu]

Yep. But you need to use a program that can read RGB format and then save it as whatever format you want. I believe GIMP can, but I just suffered a catastrophic hard drive crash and am recovering, and don't have GIMP installed to check yet.

[Gandalf Parker]

I use IrfanView for viewing and converting which is free
Be careful though. Dont choose a format such as jpg since it "compresses" the file and will smudge your white-pixels making it not work in the game when you convert back

And yes, #start is pool, and #specstart is specific

[Globu]

Thanks, Gandalf.

I did discover that there is definitely a low upper limit to the number of #start provinces (not exactly sure of the number, since I no longer have that version of the map) that prevents the use of a hundred or two hundred of them.

So, for now, it's #nostart or a very specific set of #start provinces (I was using #start to indicate all viable provinces in order to maintain usability with SemiRandom, but I just learned I can't do that.)

Unfortunately, just as a note, I had a hard drive failure and lost all my work on this and other projects. Hopefully some of it can be recovered, but it was pretty bad, as I didn't have any of it backed up. So I may not be able to get a nice, completed version of the map done for a while.

[Globu]

As a barely-consequential update, I'm still badly reeling from what has turned out to be a massively catastrophic hard drive failure, but am rebuilding and will soon restart my work on fine-tuning the map again. As it is, I think I put way too many freshwater flags on sites, and it could use a lot of tweaks. And then, of course, there is the matter of province naming.

[MadFrancis]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

Be careful though. Dont choose a format such as jpg since it "compresses" the file and will smudge your white-pixels making it not work in the game when you convert back

I know that GIMP has a function that allows you to select all pixels of a specific color and then replace it with another, allowing for this problem to be dealt with fairly quickly. I'd bet that most other editors do as well, somewhere.

That's how I convert .jpg to .xcf files to make maps with. It also retains the 255,255,255 color value (at least when placed on their own layer and not on the image layer itself) when converting a file from .xcf to .jpg, so you really shouldn't have any problems getting around the smudging.

[Globu]

New version up. See OP for details.

Testing and feedback would be much appreciated. Future work will implement Starts/NoStarts and hand-named provinces.