The town of Ashwood

[ravells]

The result of fiddling with the RPG City Map Generator and then taking it into vector and fiddling some more.

[Marken4]

Well.. The simplicity of it is pretty nice. Calibri is not a font specialized for maps, tho.. Btw, nice forests - readymade pattern?

[ravells]

The idea is that's is quick to make (under 2 hours) and easy to read. I made the forest tiling textures this morning. Do you want 'em?

I have to say, I love Calibri, it's slightly curved and friendly and incredibly clear to read (probably because the amount of work that went into the hinting part of the process when it was being made is apparently legendary). Interesting question though, what fonts are specialised for maps? I generally use Helvetica (because I have most of the family, most importantly Helvetica narrow) but I think I'll consider Calibri if I want something less formal and serious looking but still clear.

[Anoril]

Hi!
I like RPG City Map Gen because it is fresh and fast, but it is a bit paradoxal to see you playing with it after reading your impressive guide for cities
BTW, I like the style you give to your map from RPGCMG. But there is that "strange" look of streets that comes from RPGCMG that I'm not happy with. Nevertheless, the look and feel of your map is great.
The guys living here should be crazy to build houses and roads that way

[ravells]

Lol! Thanks!

Building cities from scratch is fun, but it's really time consuming. I'm constantly on the look out for lazy ways to build cities quickly! I have to say, I'm pretty impressed with the streets that RPGCMG churns out. Sure they're not perfect, but they're not bad.

[Aval Penworth]

The generator seems to make a lot of roads that go nowhere or have too few buildings. Maybe the idea is to take a square brush to the bmp right at the start and add more buildings so that the roads make more sense. It wouldn't take more than 10 mins. Then do yer trace or layer fx.

[Anoril]

You are right, Aval Penworth.
But, for instance, I make use of RPGCMG to quickly draw realistic cities in the way I got a first layout. Then, I remove or rearrange the streets to get them more natural looking. Actually, I got lot of statistical tools to get "living" cities and RPGCMG has the adventage to be able to set the finite number of building you want on your map, number of streets, etc... Which is a critical information for me: I can deduce number of living people, what are the buildings and so (acording to real world stats).
I both use RPGCMG and Ravells' guide (and some other sources like eXeditious Retreat Press great "Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe" book) to get realistic cities. I try then to stick stuff together...
If I had time, I would build a software to get all that power in a single code: statistically create a real looking city... ha... I dream... I have no time, either
Have fun guys!