Britannia, from the Ultima Games

[Hai-Etlik]

map.png

A revised version of my Britannia map which I made years ago, one of my first serious attempts at a map.

I've aimed for the period between Ultima 6 and Ultima 7, although the geometry is mostly from the Ultima 5 map. There are elements gleaned from Ultimas 4-7, 9, and Ultima Online.

I started out in Quantum GIS by tracing my old map, switched to OpenJUMP to convert the data to a format I could load into JTS easily, and then processed it though some custom software written in Java using the JTS library. That produced an SVG image with the stipples and an initial tree and mountain placement. I loaded the result into Inkscape to clean up the positioning and add further elements like the labels, and whatnot. The basic algorithm I used is as described in this paper presented at SIGGRAPH 2006 which uses Wang Tiles for high speed blue noise generation. I didn't implement the recursive aspect though as I didn't need it.

The symbols were all either drawn in Inkscape, printed in light blue at 5 times their final size, inked with a sharpie pen, scanned, cleaned up in GIMP, and then auto-traced in Inkscape. Or I drew them directly on paper with a coloured pencil, and then inked and scanned them the same way.

The small font was created the same way: I printed a sheet with reference boxes, wrote in the runes in sharpie, scanned, traced. picked loaded the result into Fontforge, and then largely used automatic metrics generation as I'm not really a typography expert. I did manage to build some ligature substitution for the combination runes like TH and NG. The larger double struck lettering was just improvised over top of the basic one scaled up and doesn't exist as a font. You can find a translation key here.

Most of the games are available on GOG, and Ultima 4 is available for free. I highly recommend them if you haven't played them, except U8 and U9 which were horrible. 4+5+6, 7, 4 (Free)

[Bogie]

Nice Black & White Map.

[Larb]

This map is fantastic. Black Gate was one of the games I played to death growing up and I really like this rendition of Britannia. Also the techniques you have used to create it are almost completely alien to me which is something that makes the map even more interesting because it looks so good.

I also at least recommend U7. It's cheap and your purchase comes with digital copies of the official maps, which are worth the money alone. =P

[Lyandra]

This has turned out to be a wonderful map Hai-Etlik! I am in awe of your techniques, just as for Larb, they are alien to me, and it is true that they make this map even more interesting and intriguing to look at.

[arsheesh]

Hai-Etik is the master of Inkscape, I have yet to see his equal. Great job on this Hai. It was a treat watching it unfold.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[priggs]

Very nice map, and I really like your compass rose! Excellent work on the symbols, too. The mountains look fantastic.

[Hai-Etlik]

Wow, that's some praise there. Thanks.

WRT Inkscape, I didn't actually do all that much that was particularly interesting in it. I just used it to trace and clean up symbols, shuffle things around to their final positions, add labels, and rasterize to the final image. The most interesting thing was probably the twisting path effect.

[Hai-Etlik]

Over the weekend this map won 2nd place in the Cowichan Exhibition (The local fall fair) in the Computer Art category.

[Larb]

Congratulations! It deserved the win!

[Schwarzkreuz]

Very nice Map, it realy is worth a prize