Author Topic: Volunteer Task: Map Re-Creation Project  (Read 68698 times)

Chenier

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Re: Volunteer Task: Map Re-Creation Project
« Reply #30: November 25, 2016, 01:32:05 PM »
If it didn't have to be made with the AoW editor, though, something could be patched up. I've given a few examples of AoW-liked rendered map. The main difference is contour, it wouldn't have any (no shores, trees cut in half). Mountains were poorly rendered, but as none of the mountain ranges actually changed as far as I can tell, that can just be copy-pasted with ease. Can't promise to ever have time/motivation for this, though I do believe I had already drawn the contours for most of Dwilight.

Modifying the map wouldn't really be much more work than redoing it, either. Maybe even less so. I'm not sure how it all looks like server-side, for travel connections and all, but going for a new version off the bat would definitely be a lot less work than doing it as is, and then modifying it.

And let's face it. Dwi's geography looked really, really cool at first. Some of these things disappointed. Others just don't work as well now that we have much less players. A huge amount of thought and effort went into pushing players to adopt new mentalities and new practices, and to change the mechanics underlying gameplay, but a disproportionately insignificant amount of it went into the maps, who almost only changed to reduce land mass, and which's modifications were almost always terrible for gameplay. But despite what some say, geography is, at least largely, deterministic. Comparing political maps of AT and BT in the days, and just their histories, went a long way to support this. Sure, realms weren't always all in exactly the same spot, but most of the continents were usually occupied by similar-expanse realms. And if there's one word to qualify the underlying concept for Dwi's geography, it's the one thing we don't want right now: isolation. That map was intentionally designed to create as much isolation as possible. Multiple thin strips of land, with islands, sliced up into countless parts by rivers, mountains, and deserts, so that some places of it would simply never be able to meaningfully interact with other parts of it. Even the cities are placed in ways to promote "natural realms", with clumps of them together seperated by vast areas of wildness. The idea now is to bring people back closer together, but it's against the map's very nature.
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