Wow, I think I've really found something...

[Zirojtan]

Back in 2011 I came here at the recommendation of some people on another forum because I was having trouble fleshing out the maps for the world that I'm building for my book series. I just kind of glanced over the forum and felt like a lot of the maps reminded me of what I would see in a stereotypical fantasy book, and I didn't join.


Now that I'm not such a close-minded ass though, it occurred to me tonight that I should join, and, here I am!


I've just been giving this place some preliminary glances thus far, but what I've seen it honestly a little bit intimidating. I really don't know as much about geography as I thought I did, and I'm really, really technologically behind in this whole game. I just finished drawing the continents for my world on... Microsoft Paint. Yes, I have GIMP, but I'm not really all that technologically savvy and I get frustrated with it a lot.


But yeah, this place looks like it could be TREMENDOUSLY helpful. It's a real shame I didn't join a couple of years ago, because I honestly probably would have been a lot farther than I am in this whole book-writing process if I had (I'm very anal about details, and not having a map has been one of the BIGGEST problems in getting started).


I'm gonna see if I can post a thread with what I have for my map at the moment, wherever the appropriate place is to do that... but uuhh... yeah, I'm pretty excited. This place looks awesome.


Oh, by the way, my name is Nate, or Zirojtan on here. I'm 22 in 21 minutes and I'm from Washington.

[Clercon]

Welcome to the guild. This is really a great place to hang out if you like maps
Looking forward to see your maps.

[Freodin]

Welcome to the guild, Nate!

Yes, "helpful" is a great term to describe this forum (another would be "utterly amazing" ).
Not only because of the tons of informations you can find here, but because of the totally awesome people who roam this board.

I hope you will feel at home here, and I as well am looking forward to your contributions, whatever they may be.

[Zirojtan]

Well, I was actually going to post a thread with my map last night, but the file is too big to upload to imageshack, which is how I normally post pictures on forums, and I attached the file here but every time it brought up that little window it would take awhile loading and then the file wouldn't attach (at least it didn't show that it had attached). So I don't know, really. The original file is a .dip, but I converted it over to a .bmp cuz those seem to be more friendly on the internet, but the size seems to be a problem (it's a VERY large image). I ripped the blank mollweide projection that I'm using off of alternatehistory.com, where it was used for the Collaborative World Project, but if the file is too big for me to upload to imageshack, I really wonder how they were able to get it on the website at all over there. Any suggestions? Cuz I really do want to upload it so I can get some feedback and such, although at the moment it's just the continental layout...

[WillyWombat]

A few thoughts on uploading. Firstoff, try using imgur. It's a much better service than imageshack. imgur: the simple image sharer

Also, save it as a .jpg it's much better at compression techniques and the most common image format used on the interwebz.

[Robin Ryuu]

Happy Birthday and welcome to the guild.

[arsheesh]

Welcome to the Guild Nate, it's never too late learn the craft.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Midgardsormr]

Not to pooh-pooh Willy's suggestion, but we strongly discourage hosting your images at other sites because it greatly increases the chances that the images will one day vanish. By uploading them here, we're more confident that the information will remain available for years to come.

His suggestion of jpeg compression is spot-on, though. Bmp is an uncompressed format that is actually not very 'net-friendly due to its huge size and incompatibility with very old browsers. Not that I expect to see anyone using Internet Explorer 4.1 these days, but you never know!

Jpeg is good for images with lots of textural detail—satellite style images, for instance. PNG is good for more illustrative images with large swathes of solid colors. Gif is discouraged due to its limitation of only 256 colors, but if you need to show some animation it's an option.

There are some limitations to image sizes that can be uploaded here, though. The file size limit for most files is something like 4.7 MB (higher for some things, like pdf, psd and bmp). I'm not sure about the resolution limit, but it's usually pretty hard to hit that one without first hitting the file size cap.

[jtougas]

Welcome to the Guild. There are many GIMP users here (myself included) and there are several great tutorials on using GIMP for mapping.

[WillyWombat]

Not to pooh-pooh Willy's suggestion, but we strongly discourage hosting your images at other sites because it greatly increases the chances that the images will one day vanish. By uploading them here, we're more confident that the information will remain available for years to come.

Oh, good to know!