WIP: Do these look like mountains?

[Uhh_Alex]

I'll try to keep this somewhat simple, but I should explain the constraints I'm working with.

To begin with, this is a very big map. It will be very detailed. It's around 14000 pixels wide. To Earth's scale, that would make every pixel a little over 2² miles.
Here's a view of the full map's landmasses to give a sense of scale.
Screenshot 2024-10-05 183447.png

I'm starting with this section at the bottom left.
Screenshot 2024-10-05 183434.png

Closer up, the mountains look like this. The lines will be a part of the final maps style, but I acknowledge it might make it harder to tell what you're looking at.
Screenshot 2024-10-05 184508.png

The real question here is: Do these look like mountains? I'm going for a more topographic view, rather than the symbols fantasy maps typically use.

[waldronate]

They can be interpreted as heavily stylized hillshaded terrain that's run through a screen process, yes. However, the level of detail on that last map makes it feel on the order of a few tens of miles across (maybe a couple of hundred across if I try really hard). But as stylized abstract mountain representations, they work just fine.

What's your map projection here?

[Uhh_Alex]

They can be interpreted as heavily stylized hillshaded terrain that's run through a screen process, yes. However, the level of detail on that last map makes it feel on the order of a few tens of miles across (maybe a couple of hundred across if I try really hard). But as stylized abstract mountain representations, they work just fine.

What's your map projection here?

Sorry, I'm pretty new to this. Could you explain a little more?

Are you saying my mountains are too small? What do you mean by "Map projection"?

[randigpanzrall]

I think, the style really works very good. It´s now depending on the scale of your world and how the rest of the map would look like, f. e. potential rivers, cities and so on. As far as dimensions are concerned, you have to see what you are planning and whether it fits

[waldronate]

Sorry about the lack of a response, but I guess it scrolled by without me noticing.

A map projection is a mathematical trick used to take a representation of the surface of a sphere and flatten it out so that you can put it onto a flat piece of paper. Every map projection has some kind of distortion inherent to the process, so that kind of distortion will affect how things look in different places in the world. If you have a flat world instead of a spherical one, then the concept of a map projection doesn't really matter.

To get an idea of how different things look at different scales, go to the satellite view on something like Google earth and zoom out to where you can see a whole continent. Look at how the mountains appear at that scale. Then zoom in until the map is a few tens of miles or so across and look at the appearance of the mountains again. The amount of detail that you are showing here is more characteristic of the zoomed-in map than the zoomed-out map. It's recognizable, but it's an unfamiliar representation for mountains in my experience.

The "screening" done by inserting the vertical blank lines is fairly distracting close up for me, but I am pretty sensitive to excess high-frequency noise as is caused by that kind of effect. I suspect that your goal might be to use that white space for some sort of additional terrain shading that would probably smooth it out a little, which might be interesting.

So... Yes, they are recognizable as mountains. I find them a little distracting at the most detailed level, but they are fine above that. How well they will work in the long run depends largely on your vision for how the map will be used and for what you intend to do with it.