Re-creating the map to hi-res?

[cretin]

could be they drained the nutrients out of the earth using one crop, and as a result they would constantly move to new locations for crops, causing a problem over a wide swath of land. Orcs do farm correct? Or someone farms for them?

[Simons Mith]

could be they drained the nutrients out of the earth using one crop, and as a result they would constantly move to new locations for crops, causing a problem over a wide swath of land. Orcs do farm correct? Or someone farms for them?

Orcs don't farm, but their society is very 'boom-and-bust' (http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php ... ic#p380382) so an orc-made dust bowl does make some sense. All they have to do is fight a few wars, burn down the forests a few times and they will ultimately make a bigger mess of things than any other Wesnoth species. The idea could certainly be made to fit, if we wanted it to.

[Boucman]

a better random map generator has been on the todo list for some time...

I can guarentee it was never created to be representative of the wesnoth climate, though

[LordBob]

Throwing in my two cents.

- I'm with Kitty regarding trees. If colour is desired, then forests and trees would be drawn with green ink, but still in a fashion similar to that of the mountains. Same applies to any other landscape features that'd be shown on the map (i.e. desert would appear as a collection of dunes and not a patch of brownish-orange texture . Overall, I would want our map to look as if it had been entirely done by hand. Whenever possible, ink, watercolor or pastels (well, their digital equivalent anyway) should be prefered to pasting pixel art.

- In a similar fashion, while not going all torn-edges-parchment, it could be a significant improvement to base the background of our map on actual parchment or any acceptable kind of rough hand-made paper. By which I mean scanning a sheet of said material, which we further improve with digital tools.

- A set of removable patches of dust, ink or even blood (on transparent background) that can be applied at will by campaign developpers to create any number of variants might also find some use.

- Expanding the map northwards and southwards is excellent, but it results in a portrait-oriented map (I'm refering to paper print settings here, not portrait art). Yet we have to keep in mind that it's most often displayed on a landscape-oriented computer screen. So eastwards and westwards expansion would also be in order. Or several different framing of a single map, but whichever you choose do not forget the screen.

- While expanding the map, I would recommand leaving blanks, i.e unexplored areas with vague coastlines and unprecise indications. This was quite common in old cartography, plus it will both allow further expansion should we ever introduce new lands in future mainline campaigns and give us some time and room to settle any inconsistensies.

[Simons Mith]

Quensul's Wercator project already has some high-res good-quality scanned parchment resources. There are copies on the forums, and I'm sure I and others have copies on our hard disks somewhere.
Another thought... Wesnoth has quite a good map editor already built in. I'm wondering if there might be ways to use that. See separate thread. http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=31936

[Jetrel]

Mostly what lordbob and kitty said.

Sole thing that I disagree with is kitty's bit about parchment edges: it's cliche, yes, but it's a harmless and cool cliche. Some cliches, like ramming elf and dwarf personalities and appearances into strict, very limited gamuts (aka the tvtropes "planet of hats") does gross damage to character interest and likeability. It makes every member of these races into predictable clones of each other.

But a cliche like 'ragged parchment' doesn't really do any harm, and moreover is arguably realistic. That scanned image that provided the edges of the above map was scanned from a page in a book from the 1800s - virtually the entire book looked like that. Yes, that could get argued that that was due to age, and that it'd take a long time for paper to get like that - but at the same time, if you were a medieval general on campaign, transporting any sort of printed paper would be very abusive to the paper. With a lack of roads - that paper would have to travel on horseback or in some footman's backpack. Sure, you could do scroll-tubes, but constantly inserting/pulling the map would abuse it (even with great care applied), and it's not like it's something you could trivially print out a new copy of.

Just because it gets done a lot doesn't mean it's intrinsically bad.