Kingdom of Kenland

[Edward II of Kenland]

So I've been working on this for a long time now and am at the point where I suppose I feel comfortable sharing this in a WIP state and asking for advice.

I plan on showing pretty much every village town and castle in Kenland, with the north being the most complete so far. Manors and the majority of settlements will not be shown. Kenland is approximately 248,000ish square miles with each pixel=1/22 square mile.

The file is huge, so I have to use google drive to share it and sadly you'll have to download it to view the full file.

File can be found here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0...DAyQ0xFWUNfQkk

I still have a ton to do including placing settlements, filling out forests, etc. I am worried that some of my rivers are unrealistic/ I may have too many around the mountain region in the center. I would like the map to look better, and I assume that will come with me filling out details. I'm thinking about maybe showing farmland, but it may look weird when there is just so much of it, especially in the far north and the central region. If you have any advice I'd love to hear it!

Here are some previews if you want to see what it looks like kind of without downloading the whole thing.
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Capture3.JPG

[Azélor]

Welcome to the Guild!

The file is really big. You might consider saving it under anther format to reduce the size of the file when you share it.
Using jpeg instead you can cut the size by 4 times, maybe more.
Png is great for vectors/plain colors and transparency but bad for texture and gradation. It doesn't compress the file at all so the file is a lot bigger than jpeg.
Jpeg compress but depending on the options you chose when you save, the quality loss is minimal unless you zoom very very close.

If your file is about 2335 by 2335 pixel or something, you should have no problem saving it in jpeg under 10mb.

[Redrobes]

(Both PNG and JPG are compressed - just that PNG is lossless and JPG is not, so JPG is smaller than PNG for most images)

[Edward II of Kenland]

Welcome to the Guild!

The file is really big. You might consider saving it under anther format to reduce the size of the file when you share it.
Using jpeg instead you can cut the size by 4 times, maybe more.
Png is great for vectors/plain colors and transparency but bad for texture and gradation. It doesn't compress the file at all so the file is a lot bigger than jpeg.
Jpeg compress but depending on the options you chose when you save, the quality loss is minimal unless you zoom very very close.

If your file is about 2335 by 2335 pixel or something, you should have no problem saving it in jpeg under 10mb.

Haha, even in JPEG it was 44mb, so I just decided to do PNG since it'll be massive anyway. I've replaced it with .jpg! Didn't know it would increase the file size by a factor of 5!

[Azélor]

Redrobes: by compressed do you mean the layers ?

What I mean is that the png looks like the original.

[Edward II of Kenland]

Starting to add some forests interspersed throughout. Capture.JPG

I actually found a map of forests still extant in England after 1550, so I scaled that up and am placing trees where they would be as a way to place them.

[Edward II of Kenland]

Started making a farmland texture, but I'm not really sure how it's working out =-/

Capture.JPG

[Arnakalar]

Started making a farmland texture, but I'm not really sure how it's working out =-/

This scans a little more like troubled topo lines than 'farmland' - I think it's primarily the irregularity and lack of boundaries. Farmland has a characteristic 'patchwork' quality, because different fields will have different colors/textures, and (especially in a 'medieval' or faux-medieval setting) are usually bounded by a fence or more commonly, hedge. Try breaking up your farmland into a patchwork of regular/semi-regular polygons, and bound them in a light dotted line? At this scale though, specifically and elegantly demarcating farmland vs. fallow/wilderness seems difficult.

Alternately, if all you want is a 'farmland' texture, you could make a 2x2 grid of alternating hatching, something like:

||| ≡
≡ |||

But, you know, more illustrated and less like you're trying to draw your map in ascii.

[Quikdraw7777]

Man, that is ALOT of countries!!
Good luck handling them all fam.

[Edward II of Kenland]

So I found azelor's AMAZING map of The Kingdom in the Clouds and saw his WIP thread and saw some great ideas for farms. I have 4 styles so far. I don't really think 1 or 2 fit the style of my map, so I'm really leaning on 3 or 4, with 4 being the frontrunner right now. In addition to trying out how to illustrate the farmland I've also changed the counties to only having the outer glow rather than solid colors (With a color overlay same as the background color over the actual color so I don't lose it if i want to go back.)

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