Guildcity - Tell me your preference for Section number

[Mouse]

Don't worry about that.
I had some thoughts I wrote down on the original sketch that didn't make it into the later version.
[But they still show as there on the lowest under layer]

I'll have a close look at what THW has made of it (which looks like a valley between two ridges), try and extrapolate southwards down through thomrey's area, and see what I come up with in mine

Mouse: If you want to post an almost blank image showing your final render sized images with the border and whatever split line you want, ill be fine with that. So long as I can accurately extract a mask image by using a fill to a border line then I am ok. My app scales icons down to a max of 2Kx2K so your whole map will max out at 4K in my app anyway. Now given that the whole overall map is 4K and the whole zoomable map is 16K then it makes little difference to them. but I can add links onto the zoom map to all of the final image attachments anyway so anyone can get to the native image resolutions.

Ummm...

I think I got the gist of that

I just have to be really careful I'm as accurate as I can be with the boundaries I share with other districts, or there will be slithers and gaps... yes?

If I compress my jpgs by about 5% to try and avoid having to shrink them any, is that going to be a problem?

[Redrobes]

All I was saying is that as usual you need to stick to your outer boundary because other people have to match up and it will get cut off or gaps if not. But if your going to chop your own section into two halves then how you do it makes no difference to me so long as I know the position your doing the split over. In fact I could make that bit faded so that one half's edge will blend into the other since both sides of the split line ought to match up. With a fade on the mask you wont see the join at all. But the exact position the split line runs across the map makes no difference - perhaps sketch out a rough plan and put it through something natually not important like a road. Its just easier for me if you can show that split line somewhere on a blank map so I dont have to guess it.

As for compression it makes little difference. To a greater degree I have to compress the JPEG quality quite a bit for the zoom map so that 16K's worth of image doesnt take up too much server room and also the smaller the data size the faster you download the tiles and then the slicker the zoom map appears. So I use 95% in Gimp for that which is not as good as it could be for quality of image I know. That 5% drop would be on top of the 5% you would save the attachment at. If you saved it as a PNG then it would look better but be about 10Mb or so per image which is not ideal for a web server really. I think JPG with 5% sounds good. Also, I don't think one apps 5% is the same as another app. Gimp at 95% looks about the same as another paint package at 75% but its subjective.

[Mouse]

Thanks Red

I can guarantee that both will be as accurate as the first one, and don't worry - I will upload a 'blank' map with the first draft on each part

John - I'm going to do both bits in the same WIP thread, unless you think they should be separated?

EDIT: Actually that will be a really bad idea, since the scraper will only pick one or the other of them up but not both - so... Red, does it matter if the numbers have anything after them, like "15 east - [name of area] [Mouse]", and "15 west - [same name of area] [Mouse]"

[Mouse]

John & Red

I haven't started my area 15 thread yet because I want to check something with you first (and it also took me several hours to work out how to set it up because I'm really dumb with maths)

This is the whole area rendered out at a similar scale to Atlas Ward, but then scaled down to half size to allow me to upload it (the original was 18MB):



To cut out the need for post processing, and to maintain the level of detail I had with Atlas Ward, it would be easier to split 15 into two halves shown by the two boxes (east is inside the wall, and west is outside the wall)

These are non reduced renders of both the halves. I've drawn a green line around the outside of the area so that Red can see what the extent is.

15 East


15 West


However, doing it this way means that I would need to run 2 threads - east and west, because the thumbnail scraper can only pick up the very last WIP in the thread. (It would also be less confusing for people trying to follow the thread if I didn't keep swapping between maps on the same thread).

Is that ok with you both? If it is, what shall I call them?

"15 - EAST [Name of area] [Mouse]", "15E - [Name of area] [Mouse]" or "15 - [two different area names to distinguish between the two] [Mouse]" ?


EDIT: If you haven't already guessed I'm splitting the area into inside and outside the wall in my mind, though they are both part of the same CC3 map

[J.Edward]

Whichever you would prefer Mouse.
My own thought would be 15 [inner] area name [mouse] and 15 [outer] area name [mouse]
But, it's up to you. Go with what feels right to you.

[Mouse]

Thanks John

I'll go with your suggestion.

Red - if there is a problem with the chosen naming convention please feel free to adjust the titles to make it work for you

Right! I'm off to start a couple of threads

[J.Edward]

Right! I'm off to start a couple of threads

I'm interested to see what you'll do for these 2 areas.

[Mouse]

LOL! that's a tricky one

The area inside the wall will probably be quite cluttered with buildings. I haven't decided what points of interest to include just yet, but I will have a look around at what everyone else is doing before I make that decision.

The area outside the wall... well, that's probably going to be full of something that nobody wants inside the city. There are already a couple of slums and farms and gardens and things outside the wall, but no one has thought of the need for a tip, or a waste recycling plant. Maybe, though, we just don't have such messy things in a fantasy world, and what would it represent anyway? The Guild just isn't a place where the trash is visible, even if it exists someplace. There's an option also for the ruins of an earlier fortification that was perhaps destroyed in a war with the orcs, or a suburban area... built in those ruins. It depends if we are currently in a stable peace with the orcs. I will have to have a think about that. Either way there will need to be better access to the outside, so that whatever people live out there can transport their goods or commute into the city to work... or even get inside the wall in a very big hurry in the event of an orc attack!

Better transport might mean a viaduct road between the ridges, and then the ridges themselves might be riddled with the kind of gorges that you sometimes get in karst country...

And now I have almost too many ideas already about what to put in this space

[Redrobes]

For the overall map, im cool with whatever you want to do. You have posted the blank sheet so ill figure whatever you come up with from that.

The wip scraper will need two threads if you want each half shown in the thumbs page. Or you could post both proper sized halves all in one thread and also post the whole area in a much scaled down image and put the wip tag on that one. You just need to make sure that the wip tag is immediately before the image you want as the thumb. The scraper used to pick the next image after the wip tag but actually now thinking about it I think the new nicer PHP based wip scraper by RobA picks the first image in the latest post which has a wip tag,

edit: I guess from a conversation continuity point of view one thread might be easier. Then again if you have different ideas going on for each half two threads would be better and they just so happen to be numbered 15.
edit - edit: I see you have two threads - thats totally fine. Lets see whats going on down there in inner and outer 15 !

[Mouse]

Thanks Red

I'm going with the two thread approach so I end up with two reasonably high res maps for all the work that will go into drawing this district. It also reflects that the inner and outer portions of this map are going to be really quite different to each other.

The city wall is the dividing line, but it will appear in its entirety on both the maps, so it doesn't really matter where you cut the mask across the region as long as its somewhere in the overlapping region.

The second and third maps in my post above are the exact extents of all the bitmaps I will be uploading as I develop them.