Kingdom of Kenland

[Edward II of Kenland]

So I've been working on this for a long time now and am at the point where I suppose I feel comfortable sharing this in a WIP state and asking for advice.

I plan on showing pretty much every village town and castle in Kenland, with the north being the most complete so far. Manors and the majority of settlements will not be shown. Kenland is approximately 248,000ish square miles with each pixel=1/22 square mile.

The file is huge, so I have to use google drive to share it and sadly you'll have to download it to view the full file.

File can be found here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0...DAyQ0xFWUNfQkk

I still have a ton to do including placing settlements, filling out forests, etc. I am worried that some of my rivers are unrealistic/ I may have too many around the mountain region in the center. I would like the map to look better, and I assume that will come with me filling out details. I'm thinking about maybe showing farmland, but it may look weird when there is just so much of it, especially in the far north and the central region. If you have any advice I'd love to hear it!

Here are some previews if you want to see what it looks like kind of without downloading the whole thing.
Capture.JPG
Capture2.JPG
Capture3.JPG

[Azélor]

Welcome to the Guild!

The file is really big. You might consider saving it under anther format to reduce the size of the file when you share it.
Using jpeg instead you can cut the size by 4 times, maybe more.
Png is great for vectors/plain colors and transparency but bad for texture and gradation. It doesn't compress the file at all so the file is a lot bigger than jpeg.
Jpeg compress but depending on the options you chose when you save, the quality loss is minimal unless you zoom very very close.

If your file is about 2335 by 2335 pixel or something, you should have no problem saving it in jpeg under 10mb.

[Edward II of Kenland]

Welcome to the Guild!

The file is really big. You might consider saving it under anther format to reduce the size of the file when you share it.
Using jpeg instead you can cut the size by 4 times, maybe more.
Png is great for vectors/plain colors and transparency but bad for texture and gradation. It doesn't compress the file at all so the file is a lot bigger than jpeg.
Jpeg compress but depending on the options you chose when you save, the quality loss is minimal unless you zoom very very close.

If your file is about 2335 by 2335 pixel or something, you should have no problem saving it in jpeg under 10mb.

Haha, even in JPEG it was 44mb, so I just decided to do PNG since it'll be massive anyway. I've replaced it with .jpg! Didn't know it would increase the file size by a factor of 5!

[Redrobes]

(Both PNG and JPG are compressed - just that PNG is lossless and JPG is not, so JPG is smaller than PNG for most images)

[Azélor]

Redrobes: by compressed do you mean the layers ?

What I mean is that the png looks like the original.

[Edward II of Kenland]

Starting to add some forests interspersed throughout. Capture.JPG

I actually found a map of forests still extant in England after 1550, so I scaled that up and am placing trees where they would be as a way to place them.

[Edward II of Kenland]

Started making a farmland texture, but I'm not really sure how it's working out =-/

Capture.JPG

[Arnakalar]

Started making a farmland texture, but I'm not really sure how it's working out =-/

This scans a little more like troubled topo lines than 'farmland' - I think it's primarily the irregularity and lack of boundaries. Farmland has a characteristic 'patchwork' quality, because different fields will have different colors/textures, and (especially in a 'medieval' or faux-medieval setting) are usually bounded by a fence or more commonly, hedge. Try breaking up your farmland into a patchwork of regular/semi-regular polygons, and bound them in a light dotted line? At this scale though, specifically and elegantly demarcating farmland vs. fallow/wilderness seems difficult.

Alternately, if all you want is a 'farmland' texture, you could make a 2x2 grid of alternating hatching, something like:

||| ≡
≡ |||

But, you know, more illustrated and less like you're trying to draw your map in ascii.

[Redrobes]

Redrobes: by compressed do you mean the layers ?

What I mean is that the png looks like the original.

Sorry - bit late with the reply - didnt catch it before now...

No not layers. The file is compressed when compared to its raw RGB size. So the file is smaller by a large amount than its uncompressed version. But the pixel values are identical to the RGB uncompressed form. JPEG is also compressed and that its file size is smaller than the originial but the pixel values will be different - especially around the areas where the values transition in brightness a lot. Its known as the JPEG artifacts. Because JPEG compresses and is allowed to change the pixel values its possible to compress it a lot more than PNG. We say that PNG is lossless but JPEG is not but both are compressed formats. Most formats are compressed but there are a few that are not (BMP files being the most common). This makes them very easy to decode since you read them in and the values are right there. With PNG and JPEG there is a lot of complex math to go through to get the image out. So often it is possible to access the image faster with an uncompressed format than a compressed on - it depends on the storage device read speed and the CPU speed - so there are reasons to use an uncompressed format. But for the web you almost always want a compressed format.

With JPEG, because it can adjust the pixel values there is a quality factor you can set. You can set JPG to use more file size to get very close to the original or you can tell it to lose a lot of the image quality and save it as a small file. I expect in this case if the image is 44Mb then the quality has been set quite high. Maybe that could be set lower until you get to 10Mb file size. On Gimp, I tend to set the quality factor to about 97% and that maintains a pretty good image.

Since were mentioning all of this. If your saving out WIPs of a map on your own hard drive then always use a lossless format like PNG and make a JPG version of it to upload here on the guild. If you keep saving JPG files and keep reusing them again and again then the pixel values will get worse and worse as it loses more and more of the file when saved. As such, all image editor native formats are always lossless. They also keep all the layer info as well. We dont support any of them here on the guild. JPG, PNG, GIF, and PDF are the main ones we see here. We can also upload ZIP files so you could put your custom format file into a ZIP and upload it but I dont recommend that approach.

If this is still confusing then ill do a tut on the subject. I did by technical side of bitmaps but that explicitly excluded the file format of the image from that tut.

[Edward II of Kenland]

Thanks for the tips Redrobes!

As far as mountains go, this is what I have right now when it comes to me replacing the brushes I previously had. Not sure how I feel about the style, but maybe if I add color it will look better.

First image is the native zoom level (with scale being each pixel=1/22 mile)

Second image is zooming out so the whole mountain range can be seen.

Capture.JPG

Capture 1.JPG