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Ok I think thats a lot better. More / Less / Comments etc ?
I have to say at this scale, the thatch is essentially indistinguishable from noise. The thatch method works really well for larger images, but less well for smaller scales. It may be less realistic, but perhaps a coarser thatch would look better on these smaller scales.
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Ok I think thats a lot better. More / Less / Comments etc ?
Yes your right but I generally don't work in any fixed scale. I have included the second image to show the thatch when viewed closer. It also shows the cobbles better. I have been talking to SeerBlue of late and he is putting some nifty GoogleMap demos together so you will be able to see the way that zooming into a map gives a lot of benefits. Its really important on a town map that when you alter one building then the town map updates for you as its all one big map. Its gonna get even better if people would like to map some interiors of the buildings as then it comes alive and you go zooming right down to the town level and then go into any of the buildings. Thats really cool. I have only ever done it on a smallish amount of houses as the amount of work to map every building is a lot but if you had many people and parties all campaigning in that area and they all make up the text of the map and combine it then it grows. Thats what I am hoping this coop mapping can give us. Maybe some people are not so hot at large scale mapping but like getting a bit of square paper out and drawing some inns, rooms, crypts, churches, guilds & whatever. Thats what interests me. I want to go anywhere and have the map for it.Originally Posted by su_liam
Is the background Grass or Trees? Either way, I would suggest at least some minor random spacing outside the gates that is muddy ground. If nothing else, the walls would need maintinence and this would account for some wear.
Second, I for one would like to see one or two more buildings with out thatched roofs. I would think in a town this size, there would be at least a few houses that may have been upgraded unless there is no other roofing option than thatch. Just my 2 cents.
Joe
Very welcome 2 cents...
Yes I agree. On the forts map I had a path around the outside for just that purpose. I figured that the guards would check that its not damaged and make repairs. I think I had better add one here too for all the same reasons + a bit of gates mud splatter.
Fentor Cross is situated on what is basically a moorland. Its high up but not as high as the stony cliffs and peaks. I'll have to check but it might be the highest altitude town on the map. The ground outside of the walls is rough grass and heather, bracken etc. Not a lot of trees up there - maybe some wiry bushes. My base texture for the town is not really high enough to show up the heather too well tho.
I agree that some of the houses should be upgraded. The guild hall, some of the inns and probably the barracks for starters. I will try to extend my "Thatching for dummies" into a "Tiling for dummies" too and get some alternative roofing styles. I can probably go a little more wild with the textures there. All thatch looks much the same but tiles can vary a bit. It could do with more house shapes too. I have about 8 I think but I could do with at least double that really. Maybe having tiled versions will do the same effect.
Don't fancy mapping a few buildings or suggesting some building types do you ? I gotta get a few stone masons, cart wrights, traders and what not in there.
I'll prob leave it there for today and do a bit more soon. Mud and tiles included.
Hey Redrobes, what is the per pixel scale of the image of Fentor Cross, above, the reason I am asking is I am dropping it into the Thrubmorton Fen Gmap, centered in the big red dot for Fentor Cross, to get a sense of scale at each zoom level.
I went with 1 foot per pixel, as a wild guess as I can't read the scale bar real well in the jpeg, if that is right the 1024x1024 image georeffed to 312m or there abouts per side falls into zoom level 18 and 19,,so starting out at the world view at zoom level 6 you could zoom into that image at zoom level 18/19.
I chunked out the fentor cross area and stepped it up in size to fill in the 4 missing levels between your highest res image and the lowest res of the village. So the in between layers are not the greatest, just filler.
It is still sitting on my hard drive now, I have to modify the html, but I sould get a chance to upload it this week end just for a test look..If the scale is different let me know and I will retile it.
SeerBlue
The scale bar is black and white squares. The first two are 10ft each, the next two are 20ft each and then one 40ft. So that makes the whole scale bar 100ft.
On post #30 there is the smaller regional map of the area so you don't need to use big red dots to align them. Also, do you want a big high res, non JPG version of the town ? I'll email you one over.
Did you see my Fentor Cross Church map I put in last night in the challenges section ? Do you think that the church should be inside the town or just out of town. I thought that it would be better just outside of the town walls. Theres lots of examples like that in old towns over here.
If the town came first (think Roman or native settlement followed by church takeover) then I would expect the church outside the city walls. If the town is post church-takover then it would be part of the nucleus of the town like the civic authority area and marketplace.
Your town has a nice square marketplace indicating likely preplanning by external authority but the church isn't in there so the church must be a relatively late thing, right?
Well I don't really know. The basic premise was that the Fentor hills stretch across the map and so the dip in the middle would be the best route across so I would think that this would be a main thoroughfare and because of the geography a good place for ambush so I would think that protection in the manner of a fort, palisaded town etc would spring up and charge for the protection.
Having said that there are plenty of similar places like that over here where there is also ruined churches and some really unusual stuff where all on its own in the middle of nowhere you get this chapel and no town at all.
I don't know whether the modern Thrublanders build the church or whether the place was ruined at the point when the palisade was erected. My personal opinion is that it would be better outside of town but I am open to comment. I can shuffle a bit of room in the town if I need to.
I always assumed that the churches were out of town because they usually had the graveyards around them and nobody wants them in town. I come from a smallish town where it is known that the place started as a ford / bridge across the joining of two substantial rivers and yet there is a big church there in the middle of the town. This town also has a completely ruined abbey (which I think predates the church) where barely anything is left of it and a roman villa. Such a mashup of history. I reckon that the key is where it is fortified as that usually does not have a full church inside but often with castles you have some tiny (private) chapel.
Saying that I can think of the cities of Bath and Wells close by here which both have old fortified walls and the Abbeys are both inside. Wells is well known to be a religious administrative center but if Bath had anything around the original spa, it was definitely build up by Romans and the Abbey is much later than that and it sits right in the middle also.
Its confusing.
In England, ages ago, landowners would give land to have a church/abbey built, in lieu of having to pay a yearly donation to the Church once it was built (Speaking from what my ancestors did in Eye, Suffolk). They seldom gave their prime agricultural land or parcels that would have economic value beyond what the donation would cost them over years, as they were generous and faithful but not so foolish.
The Church did place a higher value on land that had access to water, and good "buildability", as well as some potential for croppage. Either by the Church itself or tenant farmers.
So if it is outside of town, near water, with a bit of open fields, it has self sufficiency to a small degree and a potential for income, both from crops and burials.. "He may have died for nothing, but it cost a good goat to bury him"...Tillehn Cope TOB.
SeerBlue
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