Tag: FantasyMapping

The next step in my mapping project is to significantly enlarge the map.

When I first decided to map Ongus, I had no real intention of printing the final map and for that reason I didn’t give all that much thought to its final dimensions. What I wound up going with was a height and width for the map which fitted relatively nicely into the CC3+ drawing window on my computer.

I did wind up printing the original version, and to make it fit into the dimensions I wanted I wound up adding a band to the bottom of the map that included a heading, but was mostly white space.

With this map, I know I am going to get it printed at either A2 or A1 size – fortunately a feature of the ISO 216 paper sizes which most of the world outside North America uses is that whatever paper size you use in the A1-A10 series, the same height/width ratio remains – √ 2/1 or approximately 1.414 – so I have to enlarge my map – increase its height – to change its height/width ratio to the desired value – or in this case, it’s width (x-axis)/height (y-axis) given my maps landscape orientation as opposed to portrait.

My existing map has a width of 8890 and a height of 5080 units (in this case, those units are feet – while for most things I prefer the metric system, for a medieval based map, I chose to go with older imperial units (even though those also differ from the ones used in the middle ages). That is a 1.75 ratio. To get the desired 1.414 ratio or close to it, it’s simply a matter of dividing my maps width by 1.414 to find out the desired height – this yields a height of 6287 to the nearest foot – for convenience (because at many points in my mapping I am using a 10 foot grid), I want to round that to a nearby multiple of 10 and I chose to go with 6280, because that means increasing dimensions and moving certain objects by a convenient 1200 units – the fact that my final ratio is 1.415 rather than 1.414 is negligible.

I have also noticed that when I use a blur effect to blend together the background of my map I am winding up with areas on the edges of the map where the background is not solid, but paler than I like. While there are probably more elegant ways of addressing this, I’ve decided the simple solution is to simply add an increased border to the map of 250 units on each side.

By moving the area at the bottom of the river, 1200 pixels downwards, I enlarge the river as well, which will mean remapping the Bridge of the City, but I’ve been wanting to improve that – one thing I have always liked about the medieval city of London (on which this city is somewhat based) is the existence of the buildings that lined London Bridge during the Middle Ages, and its drawbridge – making the bridge a more significant part of Ongus seems thematically desirable.

After making these changes, here is the result. The Bridge will need to be made anew.

I’ve made virtually no changes to Freemarket, which is a small, unofficial and only tolerated market just outside of the city walls across the river. But simply adding the shadowing effects makes a difference in appearance.

You may notice trees are missing – they are still sitting there on a hidden layer, but I’m considering what I want to do with trees as something near the end.

A lot of my markers – the circles with numbers in them that indicate what a location is according to my city key – are larger than the underlying buildings. I am experimenting at the moment with making those smaller but still having them large enough to be readable on the maps I am going to be printing at the end. Again, changing all of these is a project for later.

Another district that lies just outside the city – it’s actually a manorial village belonging to an absent lord. Every major Lord in the Kingdom has a manor within a few miles of this city as a base they can use when visiting – it’s a long standing tradition. There are other manors belonging to the Crown, to Churches, even a few that have fallen into the hands of Guilds. Saint Jera’s is simply the closest such to the city and is unusually wealthy because of that.

I haven’t made major changes from the previous map but the one I have made is redoing the field of crops from the original map and I’m rather happy with how its turned out. The previous effort was very rigid and consequently very artificial looking. This one is better and also better reflects some research into what medieval fields often looked like – in particular the fact that they were ploughed in gentle curves rather than as straight lines. But the big difference is that on the previous map, those fields comprised over 30,000 entities – every plant being an individual symbol – and there was not enough value in what was appearing to justify that type of strain on processing resources. So what I did instead was map the fields separately and then convert them into a single PNG which I pasted into this map. Looks much better – only one entity instead of 30,000+.

So moving outside the walls. The area south of the city (along the river) is known as the Stink. Technically it’s not part of the city, not governed by it – the land is held by the crown – but as the winds blow this way, it’s a convenient place for more toxic and smelly businesses to operate, especially if they gain advantage from being beside the river in terms of water wheels or discharge – the sewer outflows are also in this area to add to the ambience. The crown limits development on its lands near the city walls, but the current King has not taken action against the people building in this area, and it’s developing into quite a solid long term community now. It has begun petitioning for status as a city ward.

In terms of updating the map – I’ve redone a lot of buildings with the Street tool to better reflect the fact that most people who are building out here are building fairly small though sturdy enough residences. I’ve also altered some of the building symbols I was using to better reflect the businesses I had assigned to them. And I’ve enlarged and somewhat moved the Guild Hall of one group to better reflect its increasing level of power in the city.

I’m actually not entirely happy with this area, but I’m not really sure how to fix it.

Using effects to blur the background elevations has had an impact here on the border of the map – I will have to figure out how to fix this eventually. If need be I can simply enlarge the maps borders and crop (and I will have to enlarge the borders for other reasons as well) but that seems inelegant. I’ll need to investigate if there is a better way.

Monks Reach is also just outside the city – it’s a Monastery. I’ve updated its map to add details I’ve added to it in my game over the years. Fruit trees and beehives behind the monastery.

At times, I’ve added details to this map that are unlikely to ever be noticed by anybody. I am going to include a close up here that shows one of them.

It’s a gibber located at the side of the road near the monastery. Even at the huge size I intend to print this map it is likely to be virtually invisible, but I feel better knowing it’s there.

Most executions take place on the other side of the city at a place called Holders Creek. Here I have added a couple of features (most notably stands for noble visitors to sit in as they watch the weekly public executions) from my novel, but I also made an adjustment to the bridge – the original bridge is made up of symbols from the CSUAC set – three symbols – and I have found at certain resolutions, including the one we see in the below image, they do not line up well leaving gaps in the bridge – so I used an image editing program to make a single combined bridge symbol to address that issue.

Again, I’m going to give up a closeup of this section.

The bloodstains and headsman’s block on the middle platform a W2 (between the gallows that can each hang four miscreants at once) and the corpses in the common graves at W5 will probably never be visible. But I’m mapping this city in part to help me visualise it and that means some details are ones I want there for my own mind.

This is about half of the zones outside the city. I’ll continue with the others later.

This is a very large image file – 37MB in size, 7905 x 5925 pixels and so is not posted directly on the blog.

It represents the current incarnation of the area inside the city walls of my large city map. This is still a work in progress, but I’ve broken the back of it now, and thought people might like to have a look at the current state of affairs.

All comments very welcome

http://www.libraryofhiabuor.net/WithinTheWalls.png

And now we move onto the area outside the walls. This may be a little more interesting to those following along.

The last of the districts within the walls – not that that area is finished, I have pages of notes of things I want to change, and some things I won’t have even thought of, yet – but a lot of the more tedious part of the work has been done now.

One area I’m not sure I’ve mentioned previously – as I’ve been going along, I’ve been populating church yard with gravestones in various amounts – there are reasons why some churchyards in this city are more crowded than others. I mention that here, because the churchyard in Byway (at I10), is one of the emptier in the city – it is interesting to contrast it with the churchyard in Groverest (C28) which is horribly overfilled, in terms of the way it appears on the map, and that is largely down to gravestones being placed.

Again, just a matter of crowding up an existing district, adding buildings to it. Not very exciting, but getting close to finishing this phase.

I also redid some of the streetnames (see Oak Lane for an example) to make sure they did not run up against the end of their streets – it’s generally better to have a little space at the start and end of a name if possible. I also changed the colour of some buildings here and elsewhere (H2 being an example) to make them stand out more against the background of the map.

Again, just adding buildings and changing the colour and sizes of a few things.

This will probably get a bit more interesting again in a few posts 🙂

Southside – a reasonably prosperous ward, really just needs the same crowding up as other areas, but not to the same extent. Beyond that, I fixed the spacing of the name on one road (McGrane Road) and added some front gardens to some of the homes.

Only small wards left to do now… then onto some other stuff. Actually… one thing may need to be done first. We’ll see…