MAPS: Edi's Map Projects

[Edi]

All right, people. Rather than post a separate thread every time something new crops up, I'm going to make a single thread for all of my map projects so that it'll be easier to siglink the lot of them and to keep everything in the same place.

Before I proceed, I would request that people refrain posting too much chatter or a whole lot of requests in this thread, which is intended to be a repository for progress reports on the projects, map file attachments and so forth. I figured that if people have a lot of things to say, we could have a commentary thread where any question and tangent is fair game and the chatter can stay there. Obviously, since this thing is nothing more than a personal project, unlike the bug thread management, that's all this is: A request. Follow it as you choose.

Edi's Map Projects comment thread:

Now, on to the meat of the matter:

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First off, a couple of things regarding Faerun:

1) All currently available Faerun maps are, as of this moment, obsolete. This means no updates for them. At all. Ever. No porting to Dom3 either.

I expect I'm going to get a chorus of protest howls to make a pack of dire wolves proud for that, but before those start, let me explain myself.

From the Codex of Edi:

Of the Return of the Maker of Maps and the Porting of Faerun and Its Various Incarnations into Dom3:

It was a time between patches for Dominions 3 and the Faithful were restless and crying out for the lack of suitable maps to play on, even though the Gods of Illwinter hath given them a Random Map Generator that was good. The First Sage hath just finished the monumental task of bringing the Database of Dominions 3 to a passable state of completion with the help of DrPraetorius the Diviner and no small amount of Divine assistance from the Dread Powers of Illwinter themselves. Placed he aside the Quills of Owl and Eagle Feathers and reflected on the lack of maps and recalled that once upon a time hath he been called the Maker of Maps also.

So did the Maker of Maps turn his hand to the task of making the maps of Faerun worthy of Dominions 3. Started he with the map known as Faerun 283, and verily, it was a pain in the arse to do, for there hath come such a multitude of new nations that the map hath run out of provinces and its balance hath pitched headlong into the abyss ere all the nations were accounted for. So the Maker of Maps did look down upon it and quoth he: "Screw this, and let it burn! For I shall make it anew from scratch so that it offends not my eye but looks pleasing to it instead."

The Maker of Maps then did look down upon the maps of Faerun with 424 and 324 provinces, and nearly was he struck blind and did his heart quail in anguish that he hath let such abominations out into the world. And quoth he: "Screw these too, and not once, not twice, but a minimum of three times, and a pox on them to boot ere they go to the pyre! They too shall be struck down and shattered, and I shall replace them (or at least one of them) with a better map that shall be as it should have been so long ago but was not for lack of sufficient skill and vision. And they shall be backported to Dominions II: The Ascension Wars so that the followers of the Old Faith shall not be deprived of that which they have lavished so much praise on, flawed as though its current incarnations are."

In short, if you have any games going on the Faerun maps, finish them by all means, but PLEASE do NOT start any new ones. I want those maps out of circulation and off the net as soon as possible. You will NOT regret ditching them, because the replacements will have the benefit of having all my screw-ups available for reference while making the new versions, so I can avoid them.

The new maps are going to look ten times better than the old ones. Just as it was with the Dom2 DB, the original Faerun maps were created off the cuff without putting a whole lot of thought into the process. Then, as requests came with the feedback and my mapmaking skills grew, more features were added (first the stars to indicate province locations, then the borders), all of which necessitated preserving backwards compatibility even when it was goddamn inconvenient all the time and often outright counterproductive. Just as with Dom3 DB, these new versions will be redesigned from the ground up so that they come out RIGHT this time.

There is also the matter of the actual base map graphic, well, to put it bluntly, sucking sewage and sucking it hard, sucking it long and sucking it deep. The reason for THAT is that it was pieced together from partial scans of a map that had plainly seen its share of use, hence it needed a lot of fiddling and retouching before it was ready for use and some parts of it fit together almost as gracefully as a typical soulless shambles forward. No more.

I've got my hands on a brand new, completely unblemished, larger base image which has no such problems and which I'll be using. It's about a third larger in dimension than the old one. I've drawn some of the borders (the coastal ones, which are going to be roughly the same in all versions) alredy, and compared to the old, they look so much better that I cringe every time I need to reference the old images.

It'll take a couple of weeks before the first one is ready, but my skills in both map design and image processing (GIMP FTW) are light years ahead of what they were back when the original came out, so the wait will not be as long as it otherwise might be.

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From the Codex of Edi:

Of the Quest for the Legendary Kingdoms of Kara-Tur in the Eastern Realms:

The Maker of Maps looked upon his much beloved Archives and in his heart burned anger and frustration that he should be so thwarted, for should he pursue the Quest of producing THE map of the world of Forgotten Realms for Dominions 3, would he have to sacrifice his priceless and irreplaceable manuscripts. And verily, it was too high a price. After much gnashing of teeth and the demise of countless potfuls of tea, did he discover a way to pursue his Quest to see the fabled Eastern Realms of Kara-Tur serve as a field of contest for Dominion without the destruction and desecration of his Archives.

But alas, for when he and Kaljamaha, the Overlord of Loemendor, set out to accomplish this goal, were their efforts waylaid by the gremlins that infest the reaches of the vast network that the Faithful of Dominions use to communicate with each other and procure such things they need for proper Worship. And at every turn where they deflected and misled into dead ends where the Gremlins hath scrawled on the wall in abominable handwriting things such as "Server not found" and "Request timed out" and thus were they thwarted.

But not the least deterred, even now are they girding and preparing for a new expedition and woe unto any gremlin, goblin or other miscreant who stands in their way, for they shall smite such interlopers wrathfully indeed.

2) Toril: This project is officially under way. The end result should be a map which will have the whole of Toril, meaning both Faerun and Kara-Tur, in it, and should fit ALL nations easily.

It will be based on the AD&D 2nd Edition maps, meaning it will also have the proportions of the world correct instead of the 3rd Edition bull**** where they chopped off several tens of thousands of square miles from the world and squeezed it together so that the end result looks like it had bad anal sex with itself.

It's probably a good thing there aren't Trail Maps available for Zakhara and Maztica, or you can bet that I'd try to find a way to cram them in, but alas, such is not possible. It'd probably also run into severe map image size limitations to boot.

In any case, it will have to wait until I get at least two versions of the new Faerun out the door and then it will be a fair while before it's ready. But it IS officially on the table.

[Edi]

The first release of the as yet incomplete Faerun map!

Known as Faerun 466, this map has 397 land provinces and 69 seas (16 deep seas). As of yet, the map file contains no special provinces, but all future special provinces are marked as nostart. The map is fully playable, like any other map, it just lacks the spices.

All eligible starting locations but for a very few exceptions have a minimum of five neighboring provinces, 3 sea neighbors in the case of seas.

Borders are marked in red on the map, thick border means the border is impassable and the provinces are not neighbors.

If you find any mistakes in terrain assignment or neighbors, please inform me in the commentary thread or via PM.

You can download the map at http://koti.welho.com/ehalttun/Dom3/

[Kristoffer O]

Meh, youre rar-ing again! I'll have to skip on faerun then

[Edi]

Damn! Sorry about that! I'll change it to a zip file. I meant to put it in zip, but apparently I didn't pay enough attention.

[Psientist]

Faerun is pretty much my favorite D3 map.

[MaxWilson]

Awesome! I've been looking forward to this. I'll try the special map too when it comes out, but mostly I just like big maps.

-Max

[Edi]

Ballbarian has made a slight alteration to the map image file that changes border color to a golden hue. For those who might prefer this version, it can be found at http://www.dom3minions.com/~semirand...Faerun_466.zip
The change is only cosmetic, so it will not impact any games on this map and the map files will work with it.

[lch]

Kristoffer O said:
Meh, youre rar-ing again! I'll have to skip on faerun then

What's wrong with RAR? It's not like it is a new format that just popped up within the last five years. For Linux there are unpackers for command line (like, uh, rar) and your GUI of choice (like Ark for KDE), too.

[Kristoffer O]

Like I have the energy to bother with getting a rar program

I can unzip, everyone else has to adopt!

[Gandalf Parker]

I tend to growl at RARs also. And BZ2, CAB, ACE, 7Z, even TAR. We might as well face it. If you arent ZIPing then prepare for the growls.