Cartography for Wesnoth

Post by **Kestenvarn** » March 2nd, 2006, 12:52 pm

Preview

Tutorial

Landmarks

Very simple; take the layer with the icons, set the blending mode to Color Burn and the Fill opacity to 65%.

With the parchment layer visible underneath:

Ranger M · Post by **Ranger M** » March 2nd, 2006, 1:07 pm

This would make a good tutorial actually (for campaign designers, and people helping them with art, and anybody else doing some kind of map for whatever reason), maybe you could upload something onto the wiki?

ps do you make your own parchment, or download it from somewhere? if you make your own then how do you do it? I have tried in the past and failed.

Post by **Kestenvarn** » March 2nd, 2006, 1:12 pm

The jumbled and unorganized wiki frightens me.

Parchment is my own design... been using the same one for so long that I forgot the exact process I used to create it, off-hand at least...

Could probably go back through and figure out how I did it again.

Ranger M · Post by **Ranger M** » March 2nd, 2006, 1:14 pm

Thanks, it would be good if you could

I could change this into a wiki page pretty easily, and then leave it there for you to refine it if you want later.

Post by **Kestenvarn** » March 2nd, 2006, 1:19 pm

Probably wouldn't bother editing the entry myself, although I'll likely add more to the first post in this thread eventually.

Post by **zookeeper** » March 2nd, 2006, 1:22 pm

This is great!

I have one small comment though (could be that you're planning on addressing it, in which case feel free to ignore this): the river that goes through in the middle branches to the west. I think this branch should go all the way to the west coast, like it does the old maps (couldn't attach a link to one in SVN, since it's jammed).

Post by **Kestenvarn** » March 2nd, 2006, 1:38 pm

Easiest for me to explain using the map itself, so...

Post by **zookeeper** » March 2nd, 2006, 1:50 pm

I'm not completely sure of how to interpret that - will the west ocean be connected to the river in the new map, or not, or is it just undecided?

If it won't be connected, then at least I have to basically redo all the upcoming new scenarios on my campaign, since they rely on that river quite heavily.

Now I can browse SVN properly again, so this is what I'm referring to:

Post by **Kestenvarn** » March 2nd, 2006, 2:03 pm

Blah. The map I was given had that river trail off the edge. It didn't make a lick of sense for it to actually hit the sea, so I figured it started in the mountains.

Post by **turin** » March 2nd, 2006, 5:13 pm

Hopefully it isn't too late for this... some time ago several of us decided to redo the geography of the Far Northlands, since it didn't make any sense to us. Essentially, we completely cut out the bottom half of the map and merged it with the top half of the map of Wesnoth. Here's a map of the entire continent; the relevant changes are in the top half. I basically merged the Mountains of Dorth with the Northern Mountains and cut out everything in between them.

If there are no objections, I would really like to do such a change, since IMHO it makes more sense.

Disto · Post by **Disto** » March 2nd, 2006, 5:15 pm

I take it those preset contours are unavailable for the gimp.

Post by **Jetrel** » March 2nd, 2006, 9:13 pm

turin wrote: Hopefully it isn't too late for this... some time ago several of us decided to redo the geography of the Far Northlands, since it didn't make any sense to us. Essentially, we completely cut out the bottom half of the map and merged it with the top half of the map of Wesnoth. Here's a map of the entire continent; the relevant changes are in the top half. I basically merged the Mountains of Dorth with the Northern Mountains and cut out everything in between them.

If there are no objections, I would really like to do such a change, since IMHO it makes more sense.

Turin, I really think this is a bad idea. For the same reason that the old, pre-benj geography of wesnoth was badly designed.

Do not define the boundaries of the map, and the size of continents, unless you know you'll never intend to add anything new in there. And wesnoth's main continent will always have "more stuff to add in."

Your change would delete tons of geography which people could use for campaigns; thus I say that it should stay there.

WRT your complaint, you'll need a better argument than "makes no sense"; e.g. why would it make no sense. For one thing, plate tectonics often leave multiple mountain ranges crossing a continent (c.f. the several ranges of the rocky mountains, and the appalacians).

Kestenvarn wrote:None of the above, really. Here's a few steps to show the way I go about it.

What the heck?

Cool!

I didn't know those border effects were that ... flexible. Hot dang - I learned something really useful today.

Post by **turin** » March 2nd, 2006, 9:27 pm

Jetryl wrote:Do not define the boundaries of the map, and the size of continents, unless you know you'll never intend to add anything new in there. And wesnoth's main continent will always have "more stuff to add in."

Sure. And we still have the whole area east and south of Wesnoth to fill in. And the Old Continent, which has basically nothing defined on it. The change doesn't define the boundaries of the map or the size of continents - all it does is shift Wesnoth 2 inches up or the Northlands two inches down, whichever way you want to think about it.

Jetryl wrote:Your change would delete tons of geography which people could use for campaigns; thus I say that it should stay there.

Sorry, I don't understand this at all...

Jetryl wrote:WRT your complaint, you'll need a better argument than "makes no sense"; e.g. why would it make no sense. For one thing, plate tectonics often leave multiple mountain ranges crossing a continent (c.f. the several ranges of the rocky mountains, and the appalacians).

Yeah, I probably should have explained why it made no sense first.

my reason for why it makes no sense is:

1. benji's campaign seems to say that men of Wesnoth come and attack the orcish lands in the Northlands. That would seem to me to make it necessary that Wesnoth is located at least somewhere in the general area, instead of three mountain ranges away (the three being, the Northland mountains, the Mountains of Dorth, and the Mountains of Haag). The map of the northlands that Benji made was, I am fairly certain, meant to go with this map of Wesnoth:

But it doesn't go at all with the current one.

2. The northlands have to end somewhere. If Wesnoth it about the lattitude of central Europe (france, germany, etc), you can't go too much further north before you reach the north pole. It looks to me like if you place benji's map on top of the northlands map you extend quite a bit farther than the north pole.

3. IMHO the two maps should have at least some continuity. Right now there are no land features the same on both maps. This makes it hard to place Benji's northlands on a map of the Great Continent... how far east/west are they? How far north/south?

What I would really like to see is the geography completely redone, keeping the names but basically scrapping the layout and starting over. But, I doubt that will happen.

Post by **Kestenvarn** » March 3rd, 2006, 12:35 am

turin wrote:If there are no objections, I would really like to do such a change, since IMHO it makes more sense.

I am okay with changing the map this way, as long as everyone agrees exactly how it should be done. (Heh heh. Good thing this is in the restricted section.)

I agree with you... the old map doesn't make a lick of sense. No cold regions despite being in the "North", barely any water in it, rivers that make a giant u-turn from going southeast to straight west, mountains in patches instead of ranges, a desert (of death!!1) right next to a forest...

-> What i might be working on · Post by **Eleazar** » March 3rd, 2006, 1:27 am

Here's the big picture i'd like to work towards:

Having a big map, without labels (or with layers on a separate layer) that includes the mainline areas of Wesnoth and the surroundings.
The big map would have enough pixels that it could be cropped to produce significantly smaller maps of various areas. For instance in HttT a lot of time is spent just North of Wesnoth. It would be preferable to have a map that shows this area in greater detail.