Ethran: Merelan City

[Mouse]

Bravo, Straf

I completely understand where you are coming from.

[J.Edward]

This is looking so good Mouse
I love the trees, as well as all of the other wonderful details.
You've done an exceptional job on this. Yep.

[Mouse]

Aw thanks J.Edward

I now only have the tents to worry about, but I've an idea or two that should make relatively fast work of them

[snodsy]

Wow this is looking awesome and so much detail. Only thing I'd say is the house textures seems a little too spotty, maybe a smaller texture or less contrast on them? Great job.

[Mouse]

Thanks snodsy

You always give me something to think about. First it was the heavy textures in the Bloodrock map, and now I have spotty houses?

I still haven't figured out the heavy textures, but at least I know what you mean about the spotty houses. The trouble is that they are hi res houses shrunk incredibly small (which I'm sure you figured already anyway) but they are standard CC3+ symbols, so I can't really change them. Each of those spots you see is an individual tile.



This is a screen shot zoomed in so close that you can see the sand material of the path is badly pixelated, but the house itself is still very sharp.

It may be that by changing the HSL of them (which is about all I can do to them because they are symbols) I have somehow upset the contrast in some way. I don't know. I'll have to experiment a bit.

[Straf]

"... and Merelan is particularly renowned for its spotty roofed houses..."

Ha, the guide book says they're a feature

[Mouse]

That's good, because it would take me about as long again as its already taken me to get this far to generate my own alternative house symbol set. I'm not even entirely sure I understand how those symbols work. They have a normal map that generates the shading with respect to the global sun setting. And all I know about such things is that they are pretty blue and pink images that are somehow paired with the colour image to make them work that way.

I'm only a simple mind

[Ilanthar]

I's looking really good, Mouse. I like a lot the color palette and the general feeling, between an aerial photo and a more classical fantasy map.
I have one nitpick : the shadows of the piers/boats are a bit to much away from their objects, making them "floating" too much, imo.

[Mouse]

Aw thanks, Ilanthar

Now that you have drawn my attention to them, I think you may be right about the boat shadows. They are easily adjustable, however, so I will add that to the list of final tweaks to be looked at before I get as far as even thinking about calling it 'finished'

Right at the moment I'm trying to draw tents for the refugees in the salt marsh to the north of the island - which isn't as easy as I had at first thought it would be. I did a lot of thinking about the kinds of tents that might be available in a medieval time period, before leisure time ever really existed, and decided that modern tents were probably a bit too alien for the scene. I settled on a tepee design for the nomadic plains dwelling Sorowans, as I figured that Native Americans would have worked out the best way of making a home thousands of years before any other kind of tent first appeared, and looked at lots of pictures and read lots of 'how to build your own tepee' pages.

The only thing that wasn't clear to me was just how big a tepee might be if it was designed to be large enough to house an extended family of 7-8 people, so these (below) might be rather a lot on the large side. Does anyone know? I've never seen a real tepee, but I hope I have managed to capture enough of the essence of one to make a few very tiny symbols - which are currently only draft and looking rather 'plastic' without any proper texture to them. (for comparison, the trees are about 40ft in diameter)

[Mouse]

I just had to show you this. With a bit of patient help from the Profantasy Team (Remy Monsen to be precise) I managed to understand how symbols that are sensitive to the global sun are created, and made my own little tepees as all in one symbols, rather than lots of separate shaded polygons.



They do look a bit like barnacles right here on the default green background of a blank dungeon template file, but I think they will look cool in context once I start pasting them into the MC map and give them little shadows of their own.