WIP- unnamed fantasy world

[ascanius]

Hey you two Havn't heard from you guys in a while. Nice to see others still around.

Holy cow ascanius, the style on the central bit looks awesome! Good stuff!

The raw heightmap with the plain colors looks very good too, very detailed, but as you know, I'm not apt to give technical thoughs about it since I've no idea about it.

I'm so glad to see you working on your project a bit.

Thans Groovey. I'm hopeing to spend a good portion of time working on this map, hopefully I can manage to make enough spare time. Right now I have some to spare until life happens.

I just noticed the thread has been updated !

Your mountains look good, they are so detailed! I wanted to avoid getting too much in the details because i was afraid I might make it look wrong or inconsistent.
Your doing well so far but I find that the plains look dull in comparison.

Thanks Azelor. The mountains are a lot of work and they usually end up nothing like they were at the begining. Doing black and white first helps but when you start adding color it becomes really hard to keep things consistant and the colors right. I don't know how many times I redid the west coast of the central island trying to get the orange yellow color to blend into the green of the hills to give it a dry medeterainian feel. I've noticed working at 150% zoom helps keep the mountains roughly the same size. But it's so much work!

And climates: it is very complicated to do something realistic because it requires to consider a lot of variables at the same time.
Pixie's model is flawed in some places. The biggest problem is probably the approximation factor. Each steps error stacks with the others. And I find that the resulting climates of Palamb are not that realistic.

While Pixie's method is not without merit, (I admit that his maps look really professional) I would rather use it as an indicator rather than a definitive climate map.

If the planet is similar to Earth, I would recommend to use a simplified and standardized classification of the climates that uses precise criteria. Some are based of temperature, altitude, latitude (ex: cold desert are too cold to form between the tropics), precipitation, and geographic location (east vs west). Yes, some climates are almost exclusively found either on the east or west coasts.

You can have a look here at my answer on Worldbuilding SE: http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/1395/147
The first part is a general explanation on the climate. The forth part is actually about the different climates and how to place them.
I tried to include all the main factors and to be as concise as possible.
I'm not 100% sure but I think tweaked some numbers about the temperatures here and there to be sure climates would not overlap. The original classification is a bit more complex : the difference between Cwb and Cwc is the number of months with a temperature below 10. (3 vs 4 or more). They still overlap but that is why they need to be painted on the map instead of just generating them with a automatic method.

Nice info. In the end I used Pixies tut then used that link along with wiki and the all knowing google. In end I took your advice and started with the major climate then use rain and temp maps to get more detailed, with earth as refrence.

Here is the current map. It's not perfect and needs work still.

Climate.png

I've been following this thread with interest as it has some impact on the overall design of an old campaign world that I'm revisiting. I found that link you mentioned on Worldbuilding quite informative, @Azelor. Thanks.

Nice to see others taking an interest and I'm not posting for nothing.

Ok here is an update on the mountains. It's going to take me forever to finish....

Edit: Updated image
I'm looking for input on the still unfinished mountain range. I kinda got carried away with it and now I'm worried that the central area is simply too large and mostly too high. What do you think?

Mape02test.png