Kingdom of Kenland

[Edward II of Kenland]

I wasn't expecting this to look as good as it turned out, but it turned out pretty well! My only hesitation is that it looks a little busy, but once I add in additional hills and other features to break the farms up I think it will a little better!

[Edward II of Kenland]

I finished up the farm texture and am pretty proud of it. I'm now off to marking out hills and heath/uncultivated lands. Having trouble with indicating a forested hill, and since most hills are forested I'm questioning about whether or not I just mark them as forests and just not even bother with hills.

Now that I've actually made the farm/cultivated land texture I'm really worried about how I will break it up with other textures and make it seamless and all blend together. I'm trying out this heath indicator, but I'm not really sure how I like it.

[Edward II of Kenland]

I tried out a new forest style, not sure if I like it or not. I used Schwarzkreuz's tutorial on making forests and wondered if it would fit better with the style of my map so far.

[Alturax]

By the Gods that's an undertaking! Incredible thus far, and I wish you the best of luck with it! It's turning out to be quite impressive

[DanielHasenbos]

Looks very nice. I like how you've done the terrain, it's kind of busy when zoomed in, but zoomed out it works very well. I'm not sold on the new forests. I think I prefer the individual trees in your earlier versions

[Edward II of Kenland]

Thanks for the feedback and encouragement! I decided to go back to the old forest style as I agree, it did look better.

Work on the map slowed somewhat a bit as school work was hectic this week, but I have thought about changing the map symbols and so tried this out.

[Edward II of Kenland]

So It's been more than a month and I've placed most of the towns down with the exception of the North East. I may add in more towns and villages in the North West as I feel it looks a little bare right now.

Who knows how many towns I have on here right now, but its a lot!

I'm going to go in later and change up my mountainous sections as right now they suck. I also still need to come up with a texture for moor/heath, and I may add in major paved roads (but not trails and dirt roads.)

Here's the link for the full map (with errors such as rivers that continue into ocean, etc, but I'll fix those)
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0...3lENlRKWFMtcTg

[tilt]

wow.. huge endeavor.. you have your work cut out for you. Great work so far

[Redrobes]

Redrobes: by compressed do you mean the layers ?

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

Sorry - bit late with the reply - didnt catch it before now...

No not layers. The file is compressed when compared to its raw RGB size. So the file is smaller by a large amount than its uncompressed version. But the pixel values are identical to the RGB uncompressed form. JPEG is also compressed and that its file size is smaller than the originial but the pixel values will be different - especially around the areas where the values transition in brightness a lot. Its known as the JPEG artifacts. Because JPEG compresses and is allowed to change the pixel values its possible to compress it a lot more than PNG. We say that PNG is lossless but JPEG is not but both are compressed formats. Most formats are compressed but there are a few that are not (BMP files being the most common). This makes them very easy to decode since you read them in and the values are right there. With PNG and JPEG there is a lot of complex math to go through to get the image out. So often it is possible to access the image faster with an uncompressed format than a compressed on - it depends on the storage device read speed and the CPU speed - so there are reasons to use an uncompressed format. But for the web you almost always want a compressed format.

With JPEG, because it can adjust the pixel values there is a quality factor you can set. You can set JPG to use more file size to get very close to the original or you can tell it to lose a lot of the image quality and save it as a small file. I expect in this case if the image is 44Mb then the quality has been set quite high. Maybe that could be set lower until you get to 10Mb file size. On Gimp, I tend to set the quality factor to about 97% and that maintains a pretty good image.

Since were mentioning all of this. If your saving out WIPs of a map on your own hard drive then always use a lossless format like PNG and make a JPG version of it to upload here on the guild. If you keep saving JPG files and keep reusing them again and again then the pixel values will get worse and worse as it loses more and more of the file when saved. As such, all image editor native formats are always lossless. They also keep all the layer info as well. We dont support any of them here on the guild. JPG, PNG, GIF, and PDF are the main ones we see here. We can also upload ZIP files so you could put your custom format file into a ZIP and upload it but I dont recommend that approach.

If this is still confusing then ill do a tut on the subject. I did by technical side of bitmaps but that explicitly excluded the file format of the image from that tut.

[Edward II of Kenland]

Thanks for the tips Redrobes!

As far as mountains go, this is what I have right now when it comes to me replacing the brushes I previously had. Not sure how I feel about the style, but maybe if I add color it will look better.

First image is the native zoom level (with scale being each pixel=1/22 mile)

Second image is zooming out so the whole mountain range can be seen.