Map of New Britannia

Yes, indeed they do. Each village, town, or city will have a mix of different size lots.

 

I wondered that too when the game was first announced, but logically it seems impossible to have anything resembling city that has very few houses in it. Unless there is a lot of NPC / empty houses then I think there has to be player owned village-sized lots inside the cities.

 

Yes they will, but you will also find a mix of property sizes inside of towns and cities so just because you have a village lot doesn't necessarily mean you'll have to be forced to live in a village if you don't want to.

Take a look at the 6 month progress video and pay close attention to the fortified/walled section of the town of Owl's Head. You can see village sized lots inside of those walls.

 

Piece 4:

I think its Tempest and RAGE not Roge. amirite?

 

Bah. Dyslexia for the As and Os in runic.

 

I know it is Heresy, but I still want an english translation version

 

By your command Lord MajiK

 

Thanks, Useful and Humorous Appreciate it

 

That would be Lady Majik* (I'm guessing). ;-)

Perennial Coast was just a guess... perhaps it will actually be triennial or something?

Good work with the map, again.

 

Actually no but for the nonce I am using a female avatar...fan of Marvel Comics MagiK Mutant. I also use HavoK another of my fave Mutants and also the Infamous "Men In Plaid" Avatar

 

Thanks. It was my guess too, but without all of our guesses, we'd have a pretty empty map.

 

Thanks for your work. I would like to give some constructive criticism. It seems to me (especially on a retina display) that the map is too low resolution. I see a lot of unclear text, aliasing and other things that make me not appreciate this map as much as I normally would. Also, I think you should use standard fonts. You're using a mix of different font sizes, colors and shapes and it makes the map hard to read. Also I think you should try to use standardized symbols. the ones you are using now are kind of odd (a star for a castle ?) and also they're really green and somewhat hard to read. I do thank you for your efforts tho and I hope you can improve the map in the future.

 

Thanks for your feedback Tradyblix.

I don’t know what I can do to make resolution better. It’s a .jpg saved at Photobucket for sharing purposes. When I click on the map image in the forum, the resolution looks fine; at least for a .jpg. The map is formated the way it is for easy printout on 8.5 x 11 inch paper. Have you tried printing it out? How does it look when printed?

To get the map to show on the forums I use this command:
{URL=http://s277.photobucket.com/user…]{IMG]http://i277.photobucket.com/albums.jpg[/IMG}[/URL}

Perhaps there is a better command for getting this .jpg posted? The options that Photobucket gives me are Direct, HTML and IMG. Which do you think is best for our purpose?

I’ll see about the options to use a different file than a .jpg if it helps, but I don’t know off hand what options I have. Do you have any suggestions?

What symbol do you suggest for the castle?

Regarding fonts, I’ll be happy to use everyday fonts if that is what most would prefer. I was just tyring to keep it within the theme of the game for some S&G. I figured once everyone has become familiar with all the frequently visisted places, fonts wouldn’t be much of an issue provided that they are not too small. However, if function over a medival theme is what the people, then lets take that direction.

Much like font legability, a few have mentioned colors regarding the cities. I changed the cities from red to green because at some point we’re going to know the city locations like the back of our hands and won’t need a map to tell us where they are. With this in mind I didn’t feel the need to make them stand out as much as some of the other locations that we’ll want to see on the map. The locations I’m talking about are the ones that are often referenced, but rarely visisted – unlike cities. I don’t want to let these key places get overshadowed by Owl’s Head and Brittany since everyone will know exactly where these cities are. I wanted to ensure that the obscure places weren’t so difficult to find and putting them in a sea of red and pink dots seems like the worst way to go about this. I thought it would be best if we keep red and pink to a minimum so I’m tyring to use it sparingly. As with most things in life I think that for every positive there is an associated negative. If everything stands out so easily it all gets lost so we need to pick and choose what is most important to us. Are cities the most important element? Maybe they are now, but after you’ve visted each one 20 times, how important is it that they be the most prominent feature on the map?

The volcanos are a good example of what I’m talking about: how well would they stand out if red was used for cities too? My thinking is that it would make them much harder to find, but Owl’s Head and Britanny – You don’t even need a map to know where they are so to make them stand out with the volcano’s just doesn’t seem necessary in my mind. Again, I’m just trying to plan ahead for a map full of different types of location.

Again, thanks for the feedback. Any knowledge you can provide in to ensuring the resolution is better would be great. The map is a work in progress so we'll see how it develops with community input and with that said hopefully more will chime in so we can get a better idea of what direction the majority would like to see map development take.

 

Is 1024x791 the map's native resolution, or was it downsized for posting to photobucket?

 

I had a 2250x1920 Resolution: 150 pixs/inch map drawing. The 3D relief maps with the mountains and rivers was only 898x778 Resolution: 72 pixs/inch. It looks like I had to shrink the artistic map down to the same size as the 3D relief map to get an overlay. The 3D map is transparent in order to get the drawing underneath to show, so it interfers with the sharpness that the artistic map would have even further than just the down sizing alone. Unless a bigger 3D releif map is found, I don't know what I can't do to make the background look any better other than to leave the 3D map off.

The whole reason the 3D maps was included was because it was the only reference we had at the time with a greater number of rivers. The revised artistic map that is being released in pieces now has all the rivers on it, so the original purpose for including the 3D relief is no longer. However, I'd miss the 3D mountain even though they can't really be seen in my map.

There are 6 options we have for the production of a base map:

1. Use the newest version of the artistic map with all of it's ruinic lables and over lay just the mountians from the 3D relief. Then end result will be highly unattractive mountains with some ruinic text being interfered with.
2. Use the newest version of the artistic map with all of it's ruinic lables in it's entirety.
3. Use the newest version of the artistic maps with all of it's ruinic lables and over lay the 3D relief in it's entirety. The end result is exactly what you currently see, but it will have all of those ruinic lables and banners and the sharpness that people desire will be diminished.
4. Use the old version of the artistic maps (no rivers and no lables) and do away with 3D relief completely. This will produce the sharpness that everyone is looking for, but won't have the ruinic lables which may not be a big issue, but the big minus here is that it won't have any rivers either. I don't really see a point in going about things this way.
5. Continue with what I already have.
6. Use only the 3D relief map since it is accurate to what we'll be using in game and do away with any artistic map layer. This will give us a map with no lables.

Personally, I'd like to continue to use the 3D relief map -- because it is accurate to what we'll see in-game -- and have this 3D map overlay an artistic map. The big question here is what artistic map should we use: A) the old one with no ruinic lables, or B) the new one with ruinic lables? Either/or the artistic map will need to be reduced in order to sync up with the 3D relief map so some loss in sharpness should be expected.

 

Count Napoli,

Thanks for the response. I think photobucket is resizing it or something and damaging it in the process, because I've downloaded many player made maps online that have looked a lot better than this one.

Maybe using a different provider like Flickr or something like that would be better.

As far as the fonts - I know you're trying to go for an old school look - I don't mind that if you can find an old english font that is fairly legible and readable, like the one you used for Novia.

But some of the script fonts you used different colors and sizing line after line and I don't think it looks particular good or is particularly legible atm.

I think it's a slightly odd to use a star and a cross for villages, etc... If you look at a lot of fantasy maps, the cartographers generally use a dot for a village, a circle around a dot for a town, and a star in a dot for a capital city, etc...

I was just thinking you might be able to find online a font that contains better symbols that the ones you have used so far.

I would love to see a version of this map in a high resolution - 2250x1920 sounds fantastic, but that's definately not what I can get off your photobucket site right now.

As far as printing it out, I have not tried - I want to have the map as a file I can use on my computers and iPad primarily.

Thanks for listening and keep going - great job nonetheless !

 

If you want to reference superbly designed maps, look at National Geographic.

 

898x778 w 72 pixels per inch is what i've been producing. There are two options for a 2250x1920 map:

1. The same exact map that is currently being revealed piece by piece.
2. The old version that has a very limtied number of rivers.

Neither of these would have the more accurate 3D relief data due to being 2250x1920. Are you saying that this size map is more important to you than having a map with in-game accurate rivers, hills and mountains?

"But some of the script fonts you used different colors and sizing line after line and I don't think it looks particular good or is particularly legible atm."

Again, this was strickly for theme design. I have a couple of picutres of drawing that were designed to look as if they were being presented to royalty. The vastly differing fonts and sizes are what I copied. The script was much harder to read to since it was a lot more fancy. Virtually there is no difference between what I did and they way it is written on the pictures. The only real difference is that I used some purple text; it will all be black in the next version. The whole purpose other than to help convey a medival theme was that I had extra space that I didn't want to see wasted. As the legend grows, this presented/title section -- which was nothing more than a joke -- will shrink and eventually disappear.

 

I swear, it looks just like Sosaria, circa Ultima III.



I dig it.

 

Here is an update with Story Sneak Peek #6 reveals and some suggested changes to the overall look.