New NESes, ideas, development, etc

[Immaculate]

Starlife; i've made a few maps since i've been here and i'm pretty proud of them but they got nothing on that beauty. Consider it stolen (please remove watermark).

 

[hbar]

Well, the texture's really nice. I love those little bitty mountains with nice fluffy white snow on the top. If there was anything to suggest, I would recommend having less water...because the current shape that your world has looks somewhat impossible to form by conventional plate tectonics and erosion...

Butthen again this IS fantasy. Consider it just my pet peeve.

The central inland sea is actually somewhat realistic if it is shallow. Most geologists agree that something similar happened in the North American midwest millions of years ago. You can still find quite a few fossils of marine life in my home state of Wisconsin.

I really like the map, Starlife. Aesthetically, realistically, and gameplay-y, it looks good. I would put more north-south mountain ranges on the two 'halves' of the continent, and the land to the east of any high mountain ranges would be drier than the green suggests. Other than that, Bravo!

 

[North King]

That's now how the Midwestern inland sea looked.

Personally I don't like how the continents are shaped; they're way too stringy. The detailing of the map is really very lovely, though.

 

[Starlife]

Thanks everyone, for the comments and brilliant suggestions. I will continue working on it and hopefully we can do something with it. I like the idea of adding more north-south mountain ranges, and I think a general clean-up / simplifying of some coastlines is also needed. I am enjoying hearing advice regarding realism. Even if it is eventually used for fantasy purposes, I like these more geographic-focused maps to attempt at least a little bit of realism.

I was actually recently commissioned to do an RPG fantasy map for a friend's small start-up (yay more stuff to do amidst an already busy school-filled schedule / blah). It is much different than this (more typical fantasy), but once that's done I'll post it and we can compare/contrast. Probably can't use the map without his permission, but I could just make another one in that style.

Anyway, first priority on this forum once all my schoolwork is finished is to update Ether.

 

[North King]

Well a pretty simple step is to get away from two things: the weird continent shapes and the squareness of the map. I'm not sure why everyone so universally has wacky continent shapes in fantasy geography... possibly because random map generators tend to spit them out? But if you look at Earth's continents, you don't get that with any of them. Eurasia is essentially a giant rhombus, Australia a circle, Africa and South and North America triangles. Antarctica, of course, looks like a turkey.

The point being that no continent in the real world looks like a long rectangle, or has proportions of anything more than like 3:1.

As for the "squareness", you should simply design your continents as if they were on a globe and not on a map, and then alter the map to fit the continents rather than the other way around.

 

[Thlayli]

That's now how the Midwestern inland sea looked.

Personally I don't like how the continents are shaped; they're way too stringy. The detailing of the map is really very lovely, though.

This. Additionally, your rivers are a bit hard to see. Your texturing is good, continental shapes can be improved according to the above guidelines.

 

[Luckymoose]

First off, the entire map is an elevated area with the bumpmap texture you applied and should be reduced to offer a better contrast. Secondly, on a map with such coloring a black border is not best for aesthetics, I'd go with a lighter or darker brown/green so the land and ocean blend with a defined border. Thirdly, assuming the white is snowcapped mountains and not clouds like it appears, I believe you should represent it differently as it appears like clouds. While on the cloud/ice subject the shallow sea regions make the southern and northern extremes of the map hard to distinguish between frozen seas or normal seas. I would darken the oceans, and not stay on a hard blue scale, go off towards a blue-gray. Same goes for the river systems, as they should be colored accordingly to the seas. That would be a start.

 

[sophie]

I mirror NK's opinion. Make the map look less like a Rorschach test and it'll be just fine.

Oh and the textures are just fantastic.

 

[Starlife]

Well, I was not going for portraying an entire globe, and it wasn't made through a random map generator. I am going for a single continent or smaller and the reason perhaps fantasy maps tend to look strange is to give them some interesting otherworldly features. But, I digress. The map you all are looking at is my attempt at topography - and my first one, at that. I am usually more one for designing maps that are more symbolic/political, and not topographic. So the advice you are giving me is great.

 

[North King]

No problem! I understand that we want unusual features, but honestly there are some interesting ones that you could really bring to the fore just by playing with Earth's features a little. I wish I could say something about End of Empire's map, but... it's not yet been explored.

But seriously, just try moving continental lumps around on a globe. How would things be different if we didn't have any continent on the pole, or had one on both? What would a legitimately trapped ocean basin look like (continents drifted together on all sides and closed it off from the rest of the world completely)? What if it started having its own, completely closed off climate system? What if you had a faster spinning world, so it had more air-circulation belts, increasing the variability of climates? Actually now I want to make a map with the last one... >_>

Or simpler stuff. How would a massive chain of salt lakes (think like the Great Lakes... except salty) in the middle of the Sahara look? What if you took an Asia-like continent and moved it south a little bit so that the northern coast of not-Russia was ice-free and you could circumnavigate it?

And so on.

 

[Nuka-sama]

Anyone want to play Cold War with this?

Spoiler :

Or should I use the map we have for 1980?

 

[Kentharu]

I'd sooner gouge my eyes out.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

Jesus that's old.

 

[Dachs]

Well, it'd certainly send a message about the rest of your NES.

 

[Daftpanzer]

haters gonna

 

[Adrogans]

Uh yeah but with good reason in this case I feel.

 

[North King]

Anyone want to play Cold War with this?

Spoiler :

Nah, the eastern border for Germany is a bit off.

 

[sophie]

Nah, the eastern border for Germany is a bit off.

Juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust a bit. lol.

 

[Daftpanzer]

Im guessing think its an alternate 1946 where Germany made early surrender to the western allies, and Israel got moved to Syria, Communist Chinese had early victory and united with vietnam, British somehow evacuated Malaya and all of Africa, a Carribean Federation somehow formed, Free French were somehow forced to occupy british Guyana and Suriname... OK I give up!

 

[Nuka-sama]

Haha in all seriousness, I would be using the lovely 1980 map we have by Symphony