A great project

[Shyriath]

I was going to wait until there was more to show before announcing this, but in the interests of having something less divisive around to talk about:

My recent use of CORELDraw in various flag-making experiments led me to realize that, against all expectations, I wasn't actually that bad at using it. I did a few less geometric scribblings, to see what kind of freeform results I could get, and I was encouraged. And then I remembered the talk of making a map of Shireroth, and I wondered: could the magic of vector graphics be applied to this? If it worked, we could have a map that would be better- and cleaner-looking, that would be more easily modifiable, that we could tack all kinds of stuff onto (like road and rail networks)...

As a demonstration of the bits that I've managed so far, see here. The boundaries represent long, painful hours of tracing over the MCS map on a laptop touchpad, but once the lines are established, tweaking them in the program becomes easy. Obviously, the Benacian continent is done; the Apollonian one will follow, along with its associated islands. And once I have the shape of the land put in, then the national and county boundaries can follow, and cities and towns, and so on and so forth.

It's not much right now, but it could become a lot more.

[Andreas the Wise]

Forgive me for not being tech-savvy when it comes to graphic designs ... am I right in thinking that this means you can now zoom in the map a great deal and it doesn't look pixelated?

[Shyriath]

That's so, so long as it stays in the vector format; it's also potentially easier to edit, because the data is stored as lines and shapes rather than pixels, and if you know how you can tweak them into the shape you prefer. The file I linked to is just a regular raster image format, converted from Corel's vector format; Photobucket doesn't seem keen on accepting .svg files, which seem to be the vector format most used on the web, so I had no easy way of hosting one. Otherwise, it would have been easier to see the difference.

Also, I know there used to be problems with .svg support on certain browsers, although I would hope that's been resolved by now...

[Shyriath]

Update: currently working on the islands surrounding Apollonia, after which I will start tracing the continent itself. That's gonna be some work right there, Ah tell yew whut.

After that, or maybe concurrently with that, I can start on the political boundaries. I'm thinking maybe concurrently; it'll give me a chance to work out how I want to do things.

[Kaiseress Anandja II]

Could you please ditch the dotted county boundaries? That would be really appreciated.

[Shyriath]

I'd been planning to use at least cleaner ones, but I suppose there might be other line styles that would work. I want to leave room for visual contrast between national and either one or two levels of subdivisional boundaries, though. Might not be so important for doing just Shireroth... But, after all, once Shireroth is well and fully served by the map, maybe it would be worth it to expand its scope somewhat further.

[Kaiseress Anandja II]

Perhaps thin transparent grey lines?

[Harvey Steffke]

This is great Shyriath. Let me know when you have a clean Amity; I may have a fun use for it.

[Shyriath]

That I can. *Remembers doing a map of Amity once, based on an even older one Gman had given him... He wonders if hie still has it around, or if someone else does...*

The gray lines may work, yes. Or, if I can figure out how to do a particularly nice idea that occurred to me a few minutes ago, maybe something a little different altogether, though it'll be somewhat more complicated...

[Andreas the Wise]

That I can. *Remembers doing a map of Amity once, based on an even older one Gman had given him... He wonders if hie still has it around, or if someone else does...*

The gray lines may work, yes. Or, if I can figure out how to do a particularly nice idea that occurred to me a few minutes ago, maybe something a little different altogether, though it'll be somewhat more complicated...

Does your program do layers? The simple thing would be to do political boundaries as lines on a different layer, then you can change them or their colour whenever you want.

[Shyriath]

Yep. I've been separating things out into layers, so no problem there; just musing over appearance.

[Erik Mortis]

Shyriath for DirCart!

[Kaiseress Anandja II]

So Shy, wanna be Director of Cartography?

[Shyriath]

Might as well; I've more or less committed myself to the responsibility for the new map, having the position that would normally hold said responsibility would be a logical step.

Hopefully I shall do more good as this than as Mango/Moose King of Arms - speaking of which, would you prefer to hand that to someone else? I haven't come up with much related work on it, and considering what I'm going to be doing with the map I'm not sure I'd have time for it even if any great ideas came to me. I could still provide advice and such; I have some books on heraldry lying around the place.

[Kaiseress Anandja II]

I'll put the question out there, but if there are no qualified applicants, I'd rather keep you than have Mr. Nobody do it, since he's a notorious fuck-up.

[Shyriath]

Very well, then.

Now, semi-daily map update, as follows:

Islands, islands, islands, and more @%$!* islands. There is a metric assload of islands around Apollonia. I don't know which person did this part of the map, but I hope they're damn happy with themselves. :P

But, on the good side, it did allow me to make a nice discovery about the Freehand Tool I've been using to trace the landmasses. The tool has an automatic smoothing function to keep the line from looking too choppy as an unsteady hand guide the cursor around, which is good, because my hand is very unsteady. The downside is that very often it's been smoothing too much; I would painstakingly trace a long segment, which is hard to do without taking your finger off the trackpad button, only to have the complicated shape reduced to a simpler curve that I would have to go back and twist around to match the coast again. It was nearly enough to make me just draw wide slashes along the coastlines anyway and try to go back and edit them all later, except that sometimes the coasts would come out almost exactly right. It wasn't until today that I realized that almost all the places where this happened were small islands, and nearly all of the remainder were other places where, for one reason or another, I had to draw short segments of coast on after another instead of trying to do long stretches all at once. The longer the uninterrupted stretch, the worse the smoothing. As a result, the work is much less frustrating now.

...Sorry. Had to ramble.

[Erik Mortis]

I would claim to have done them.. but it wasn't me.

[Shyriath]

I can blame you anyway, if you like?

[Erik Mortis]

Most others do.. so go for it.

[Shyriath]

Finished Apollonia. Currently doing the national borders of Shireroth, in places where rivers and coasts aren't already forming borders.

From now on, further updates will be posted in this thread.