Extrasolar colony world

[Azélor]

Can you open the file at all?

[jshoer]

I've tried a couple variants on "Open As..." and "Open" in Photoshop, as well as renaming the file to various extensions and opening in other programs. No luck so far.

At least, in the meantime, what I've been able to do is take my most recent full-size flattened image and satisfactorily erase the text labels from it. I can put the flattened image on the bottom layer and re-add the labels. I will have an annoying time fixing up the mountains, but I won't have to start over again from scratch. Thankfully the image is graphically simple so far...

[jshoer]

I have calmed down a bit from my earlier panic. I would still like to recover the old file so I can get all the layers, but if I need to, I think I can reconstruct it. Not only was I able to erase the old labels from a flattened image, but I was able to pretty easily get the mountain shading onto its own layer. The ridgelines got lost, but I can rebuild them if we think that would look better.

Soooooooo, what I was doing today just before the big crash was this:

Major cities and towns are now labeled with their year of incorporation ("AA" stands for "After Arrival" in the star system) and population in the year 315 AA. My population model - viewable here, if you're curious - generally assumes a relatively slow 1% net annual growth rate from the initial three settlements of Colony, Weilai, and Transceiver Tower in 20 AA. When subsequent settlements are founded, they come from the population of existing towns. There is also a negative hit to the growth rate to account for major plagues (one in Colony/Landing Field in 225-235 AA, and one in Timber in 260) and wars (one between the nation of Colony and the Khet Compact in 240 AA). Settlements with <1000 residents in 315 are not shown.

I have also added political borders to the map by playing with layer blending options. The major nations are Colony, Weilai, Transceiver Tower, and the Khet Compact. Arksite and Naya Chaukee comprise emigrants from Weilai, but are autonomous, so they also get a color. (They've also been ambitious about claiming the whole continent.) Settlements outside the shaded political boundaries are unaffiliated. There is some notable disputed territory left over from the War of 240, in which Colony tried to re-capture Khet after the Khet Compact seceded from Colony to isolate themselves from the spread of the plague.

Colony6.png

Now for some art questions:

Anybody know if there's a way to make the water color show through the outer glow layer on my text? I think the text partly over oceans looks funny.

Any other ideas on how to indicate the disputed territory, other than having the borders overlap like this?

I am, of course, still happy to hear ideas about how to recover layers from a corrupted .psd to save me some effort down the line.

Thanks!

[selden]

Can the Glow be drawn on another separate layer? Could you then make that layer translucent?

Sometimes disputed territory is indicated by coloring it with alternate areas (crosshatch, diagonals, etc) having the colors of the disputing political regions.

Maybe it's too late, but did you try to recover from PhotoShop's .temp file?

If you're using Windows, you might be able to use Windows' "restore point" feature. If you haven't already done so, you should consider turning the feature "system protection" on for the disk where you do your work, giving it enough space so it can keep copies of several previous versions of your files. Then when you right-mouse-button click on a file, it'll give you the option of restoring previous versions. This would include .temp files, I believe.

[jshoer]

Maybe it's too late, but did you try to recover from PhotoShop's .temp file?

Where does Photoshop keep these? I looked in some obvious places, but didn't see anything...

[selden]

I don't use or have Photoshop installed, but a Google search found this claim when using it under Win7:

It's in C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Temp. To access that, you can type %LocalAppData%\Temp in the Start > Run field.

[jshoer]

Okay, yeah, that was one of the places I looked. Didn't see anything likely in there, mostly folders with gobbledegook names holding system files and registry keys. There was a Photoshop-named folder, but it was empty. I guess the temp file is gone. Thanks anyway!

[selden]

You might try selecting "restore previous versions" on the directory itself. It might find something, depending on the timing between when its snapshot was done and when you were working on something.

Also, have you tried a "restore previous version" of the .PSD file?

[jshoer]

Yeah, version history wasn't enabled.

[jshoer]

Okay, enough sad stuff.

I added some Google-map style indications of vegetated areas. I have been tweaking the national borders and added a pattern for the disputed territory around Khet. Also started sketching out some ideas for information to include in the border areas. I'll probably go back and work on the underlying map again, now that a lot of the style is established.

Colony7.png

Any suggestions or opinions?