How are accurate maps created?

If I want to create a map of a fantasy world or even an accurate scale of the earth there is no way I can make it accurate by hand. How do people do this? I wanted to make a map but I can't find an existing map that has an accurate geography of Estonia so I can't do it. I have to make my own worlds where there is no set borders.

Is there a tool I can use to make them accurate to the real world?

I've always done it by comparing maps from the internet and focusing on the coastlines first and doing bit by bit. Not sure if there is a faster way of doing it.

i did never open the civ3-editor, but i once drew a map for civ2. i chose a real map, copied it and drew a grid onto it by hand, by the scales of the number of tiles my civ-map had. then i first put the tiles at the grid intersections in, simply copying from the real map. from there I continued as Nathiri describes it. that way the map became pretty accurate...



t_x

Immortal7777 said:

If I want to create a map of a fantasy world or even an accurate scale of the earth there is no way I can make it accurate by hand. How do people do this? I wanted to make a map but I can't find an existing map that has an accurate geography of Estonia so I can't do it. I have to make my own worlds where there is no set borders.

Is there a tool I can use to make them accurate to the real world?

Click to expand...

You might want to ask this question in the Creation and Customization Forum, where there are quite a few people making maps of the Earth and Fantasy Worlds. There are some software tools that you can use in conjunction with the Editor. You may also find a map close to what you need and be able to modify it.

Check out the User Created Map sub-forum as well.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=52

There are some good tutorials on this by some people in the C&C sub-forum. I can probably look them up later, but it's very late currently where I am.

For automatically creating maps that you can then edit further, BMP2BIC is the traditional tool, and it should still be available on the forums. One of the limitations is that it only works for a few square map sizes. To address that limitation, I added a bitmap to BIQ functionality to my civ editor (link in signature). It allows you to import a map from a 16-to-256-color BMP file - I recommend going towards the low end of that - and get a BIQ map (of a Civ3-supported dimension) from it. You'll have to edit it to fine-tune it, but if you have a satellite image of the area you wish to import from, it can give a nice jump start. You can read more about it from the editor's help menu (View Help -> Import Map from BMP), and there also is documentation online that I'll link to when I am more well rested.