*** January 2010 Challenge - Up and down the scales ***

[Redrobes]

The rule is there to stop people submitting a completed map with days and days worth of effort put into it thus giving an unfair advantage to people who otherwise have only 25 days to do it. I posted a map once which I had worked on but not completed and we have had others who got a small way in too. Its happened before and I think its no problem. Also people use premade bits of art like mountain tokens, or dungeon gear and other bits and pieces too which we normally try to declare where we got them. Its more about making an honest attempt at doing the map in about a month than being super strict about the exact second it started. If you had done two weeks already then it might feel bad to others but a few hours... I don't think anyone can claim that they are going to spend every minute of their month on a map so that one or two extra hours would have made all the difference. Your efforts were one of the strong reasons I asked to put this challenge forward to this month so that what people are naturally trying to achieve can be made into a challenge with possible gold compasses or prizes to gain from it.

[Gandwarf]

Agreed with Redrobes, it's not a problem. The rule is mainly there to make sure noone is submitting maps that were made long before a challenge.

[Tear]

Hmmm... this could be a good occasion to make a small contribution to the CWBP... I'll have a look at the tiles...

[Redrobes]

This is prob the easiest link to get at them:

http://cwbp.cartographersguild.com/i...oject_Overview

[Tear]

Thanks. I was thinking about doing a regional map which would have a size of around 1/9th of a tile. I don't know how useful it would be to the project, but I'd like to give it a shot.

So a tile is approximately 600 miles in width, depending on latitude?

[Redrobes]

For me, I don't work well in curved space so I took all the tiles to be 600x600 miles but they are more than that south and smaller up north. On the project page there is some text at top and a link in there is to the original set up for the CWBP. Neon did the world in Fractal Terrains and it had some stats about exactly how wide each of the tiles were per latitude.

The thing is tho that if we really go with the curved space thing then all the icons for houses and stuff need to be bigger as we go to more northerly tiles and smaller for more southerly tiles (up to equator of course...). As far as I know it never made the slightest difference to anybody's tile and might only really affect anyone roleplaying a boat journey around Ansium. And as people mapped smaller regions they usually put in their own scale for that map - which I would hope was close enough to be about right whatever scale you chose.

So if making a map where you wanted to map something which say Ansium as a whole fitted into then I think it would be prudent to consider the curvature but for a map of a tile size or less then its easier to approximate it to being rectangular and run with it ignoring the slight error. You can go with 600x600 or A x 600 where A is whatever that tile checks out to be from Neons world stats.

EDIT:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...66&postcount=4

I don't know where the 600 number came from but it seems that to be exact the top tiles are 270miles across and the bottom ones are 523 tho 600 has been used a lot since the start.

Also, this post is supposed to tell the region being mapped as degrees in lat/long
http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...86&postcount=6

and this one has stats about the world that was used as the starting point in Fractal Terrains:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...2&postcount=12

so the two together should also give all the values for sizes as required.

Actually this one is killer for the answer if using earth sized sphere which is a little off of the CWBP sphere:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...55&postcount=9

so as you can see quite a lot of disparity all round. Neons stats are the fact but interpreting them has been shown to be more difficult than you would have thought. Again, I don't think it makes for much difference, so you call it as you like.

[Tear]

Thank you for your quick and detailed answer.
After reading all that, I think I'll just run with the general rule of a tile being around 600 miles across, somewhat less for the northern ones. Most maps seem to apply that rule, more or less, even if it makes the planet larger than initially planned.
I'll open a thread for my WIP.

[Jaxilon]

Ok thanks for the clarification. I'm not going to have any guilt either because I will not have any real time for this for at least the next week or so....

Besides, everything will have to work perfectly for me to pull this off. Meaning I'll probably run into issues with something that will kill my creative flow at some point just due to my not knowing how to make my software do what I want.

It'll be fun anyway!

[Redrobes]

Theres about two days left now before challenge closes Tues Night 0:00 GMT (approx) and I like one of those nagging exam adjudicators just wanted to remind about the close time and also to request that if anyone has not posted what their map scale is or what the reference map is then you need to put that in even if its just text in a post.

[Redrobes]

Voting board is now up !