Xarthia (WIP)

[Notsonoble]

So I'm working on a early industrial era game in a setting I've been working on for a long time. This means I'm taking a section of one of my older maps and "zooming in". I'm also going from a basic overworld map to something like the texas map attached as a reference piece. I have no mountains, rivers, or roads hashed out on this yet. The old map has some height in it, so I'll be using that.

I'm already several hours into it from scaling up a section of the xcf of the continent map. Selecting the shore line and converting the selection to a path still meant a lot of time making the path something that worked with the stroke path function in gimp. I may want some advice later.

Attached are the old continent map, the reference map (an 1890s SW central US map) and the current WIP.

[Notsonoble]

From blue to red, a topographic draft based on the continent maps, few height details.

I'd really like some comments here, if red is mountain peaks, rivers for this are going to be bonkers.

[Falconius]

You going to wilburize it? If so you may want to help direct rivers by depressing the gradient a bit and cutting any basins beforehand. But otherwise Wilbur will draw where the rivers go, to a decent extent. If you are avoiding topographical details then just draw where you estimate the rivers would go based on the hight data you have. It won't be as hard as all that.

[Notsonoble]

It's been a while, but i believe I tried using wilbur on the continent as a whole when I scaled it from a world map and essentially got a useless mess. So probably not, my issue isn't how to get the rivers in, its does this topo make sense.

[Rittmeister_Krefeld]

in general they look feasible, of course you always need exits for water, so any encircled plains you have, like the one in the bottom right and top right, will need to have some way for the water to get out, or else, they will just be lakes
Wilbur will just fill them in with either water or earth, to get around the issue, so you'll have to help it along by making a small gap where you want the rivers to get out of these bowls!

[Notsonoble]

I'll see if I can't give wilbur a second shot. Getting it to behave on linux has always been interesting though.

[Notsonoble]

This is where wilbur starts if I just take a black and white of the existing terrain layer i've got.

[Notsonoble]

Fighting with something sensible in wilbur, between bouts of day job explosions make me think I think i might be going about this all wrong...

I'm taking a map that was originally made in 2008, and had 5 continents on a size that was pretty much 1px =36ish sq miles. I've scaled up this original image 3 or 4 times before starting this map which is scaled in again, without any attempt to clean up the mess that would create.

So should I start "fresh"? Just take note of high and low points, and shoreline, and do over from there.

[Notsonoble]

Based in the idea of "start fresh" this is a height map so far from following the Eriond tutorial. Which is for a world map, but there's not really a regional tut that handles wilbur unless i'm missing one.

[Notsonoble]

The step to select rivers is giving me fits, too high a threshold and it selects blobs, to low and it misses huge chunks of river. So i've added a step where i select what i can, select to path, and exporting to inkscape to clean up the path. (GIMPs selection to path still encircles even 1 px sections so every line is doubled.) It's slow going, and the rivers are still kinda crazy.