New Haven

[pyrandon]

Keedo, this is coming along wonderfully. I suggest you tone down (i.e., desaturate) all your colors a bit. I think the longer you keep them "neon" like this, the less you will be impressed with your wonderful efforts so far.

Keep it going! Keep posting!

[Keedo]

Yeah, it is a little bright. I am noticing especially that the stone bridges still don't stand out enough either because the terrain is too bright or the bridges themselves are too bright, or both. Eventually, I'll mess around with adding some texture to the walls and maybe a slight texture and/or shadow to the bridges to help them stand out. As for the terrain within the city, most of it will be swallowed up by the buildings. In its finished state, there will be very little noticeable terrain within the city walls except on the islands. It is meant to be a densely populated city with narrow streets and alleyways, especially in the southern section which will mostly be tightly packed apartment-style buildings and the kind of buildings (not sure the technical term) where they are built on top of other buildings sometimes to where there are maze-like pathways under and between them, but no real roads. There will also be some "suburb" villages outside the walls near the city gates. Well I think I'm starting to ramble. lol I'll probably post another update later tonight. I just got home from work.

[Keedo]

OK, here is my update for today. No major changes this time. Added some color layers to the western island to indicate where the hills on it will be. Also made the major roads for the southern and eastern sections. Put in two black shapes in the southern section to indicate a pair of chasms that were not filled in by the river after the earthquake (see my "Unofficial Map Challenge" thread in the Mapmaking Requests forum for details on that). I may combine them into one chasm later, and will of course add detail to them at some point so they are not just black shapes. I figure there were undoubtedly many smaller chasms created by the earthquake that were filled in with dirt during the reconstruction, but these two large ones were too deep and wide to be filled in, and they will also be connected to a ruined section of the sewer tunnels and my labyrinth of caverns (though those will not of course show up on this map).

[Keedo]

I have not had the opportunity to do much work on my map the past few days, but here is my latest update. Again, no major changes. Added a few roads, and started adding buildings (mostly around the small lake and on the northernmost island). I notice that some of the smaller hut-like buildings on the northernmost island ended up looking like trees at this resolution. I'll have to fix that later. All of the buildings were cut and pasted from a collection of premade buildings. Very basically designed, but since they are so small on the map, I did not need them to be too highly detailed. Some of the more unique buildings such as the temples, I will probably custom design myself.

[Keedo]

OK, here is my update for today. The changes are more noticeable this time. I have added more buildings, but most noticeable are the docks. I put in a bunch of different sized boats (actually the same boat resized to make small, medium, and large versions) to help show scale. Looking at the large boats in relation to the harbor, I have noticed that I will probably have to increase the size of the royal harbor to accomodate the naval fleet. As it is now, I can only comfortably fit 4 of the large ships, and no naval fleet worth anything will have only 4 ships.... You will also notice that I added in the arena. I will no doubt end up moving it around, and maybe resizing it as I fill that area with buildings and streets.

[RobA]

Keedo -

With that level of detail, I don't know if the textured roofs are coming across as good, or bad. They might be clearer as just solid blocks of colour as the dithering makes them look blotchy to me.

-Rob A>

[Keedo]

I'm not surprised you said that. I don't think the buildings I used were meant to be reduced in size so much, but I like them for my generic buildings. Even before I posted the pic, I was worried about how they would look once exported. I had toyed with the idea of just increasing the page size and scaling everything proportionately. Of course that makes the file size much larger as well. So anyway, here is a much larger version of it. I actually tried making an even larger version, but that made Inkscape freeze up. But that's probably because my computer sucks, not Inkscape. So anyway...again, here's the larger map.