Guild City

[Mouse]

Not at all, DarkInfinity. No need to apologise

The size of a building can vary considerably, depending on wealth and age of the area. Older, poorer areas are likely to be more crowded with narrower streets than newer richer ones.

In a sense its not so much the size of the houses, but the size of the telltale little things, like chimney pots. You wouldn't want a pot that was 5' in diameter (unless you had built them so that you could use Orc children to do the chimney sweeping).

You will be able to tell if you've got the scale of things about right compared to your immediate neighbour areas the moment we start uploading our first drafts. If I have understood even just half of what Redrobes has been saying, there will be a complete city map in draft form - made up from all our drafts that we can use for visual reference and comparisons.

And remember - if all the houses are exactly the same across the entire city, then it wouldn't really be all that interesting a map to look at, so even if there are fractional differences its not really a huge concern - especially not at the first draft stage.

AND... don't imagine that you will be the only one making mistakes. I'll be right there with you most likely

[Jalerym]

Ok, finally sitting down after rolling things around in my head all day.

J.Edward, I really like that sketch. The topography also seems really varied which could lead to some really good design ideas and I think the water in the center being a cavernous sinkhole is cool.

Doing it in the steampunk style could give everyone the freedom to go more medieval if they chose or make it really clockworky. But someone (I'm sorry idk who, I tried searching) mentioned the city could have districts from different era's and it's our sandbox I think we could make it work if we so desired.

When I would do my own maps I would make them a super high resolution and that would be fine having GB gimp file on my own computer. But I wouldn't have the foggiest of how to do it with a scale this large and it being on the Internet.


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[lorelei]

Lorelei!!! Long time no see!

I have to sit down a minute - John gives us a beautiful map, and then you turn up - 'just like that'

Are you in with the gang?

Yes, im in. Just perfect timing.....i check back here once in a while

[Mouse]

Excellent! I'll add your name.

Great to see you around again

[Wingshaw]

I like J. Edward's draft layout. I think that part of the fun of a project like this is working with something that you didn't control to begin with. If I'm making a city map from scratch, I get to control the terrain and everything; if using J. Edward's terrain, I have some fun problem-solving activities fitting my vision of the district to the terrain. So it's a thumbs up from me.

Another thought about the time period: let's say that Guild City lasts for many thousands of years. At some point it existed in a medieval era; at another point it was modern; and then at another it headed into sci-fi and/or post-apocalyptic. We could each map a neighbourhood in any era we want, and what we are doing is showing how that area looked at that particular time. Thus, if I did a steampunk neighbourhood next to someone's medieval one, it isn't supposed to be two neighbourhoods at the same moment in time, but rather two neighbourhoods separated by hundreds of years. I'm not sure if that's too complicated, though...

I think Mouse raised a good point about shadows. Probably the best approach would be if J.Edward is able to indicate the direction of light on the layout map, as well as scale. Perhaps also an inset map showing the countryside beyond Guild City, so we can see major towns/landmarks that might get connected up with Guild City (i.e. highways/canals/railway lines etc.).

THW

[Azélor]

with water falls going into them. It might be neat to even have buildings or tunnel entrances scaling the sides of the cliffs down the sink holes, if that makes any sense. And the citizens could even build big water wheels there to get power for the city... Just a thought.

Doing it in the steampunk style could give everyone the freedom to go more medieval if they chose or make it really clockworky

I like where this is going and the layout look interesting to work with.

I was wondering how big the city will be in term of population and size. From what I can understand from Robbie's map, it's not a big city by modern standards. A city of 25k people could fit in an area of 1 sq km. Of course, we don't have to follow the era standards, I'm just pointing it as a reference.

[Redrobes]

Thats a good point about shadows. Not all that important when doing terrain but on a city map it jars a lot if the shadows dont all point in the same direction.

I wanted to talk a bit about scale. There are two scales. One is the real (ok fictional but lets say physical) world like houses and doors and roads etc and the other scale is the resolution in pixels. Its important that people get the real world scale about right so everyones houses look about the same size. Your going to be given a sector of a city to do with some kind of border shape to it. So this has to fit in with everyone elses shapes to make the collage or mosaic to build up the city. So the size of a house in relation to the border shape size is important and J.E said we should get a 5' grid on it to help out.

Regarding the resolution, it makes no difference what resolution in pixels of the bitmap you want to map it at. It doesnt mean that we all have to map at a precise number of pixels so that the city comes out the right size. When I make a composite map of the bits I can scale them to fit so they piece together ok. All that matters is that the border shape stays the same and that if a road exits on a border or you have some kind of special feature in the overall map that crosses outside of your boundary then you dont move it.

But you should be able to take the given sector mask / border shape and scale it up or down in pixel size to suite your mapping style. If you map in vectors then fine, you can export a WIP bitmap at whatever res you want to.

[Mouse]

Now that we're discussing details can I ask if we need to keep the sections as transparent png files?

I will be using a combination of CC3+ and GIMP, but there are several CC3+ users here and CC3+ doesn't export transparent png files.

Is that going to be a problem?

EDIT: Also with the shadows - maybe we should do them a fixed transparency and sharp edged, so that we don't have variations in depth and blur effects that don't make sense? Also a sort of crude guide about length of shadow required for each storey, so that my 3 storey buildings don't look taller than your 6 storey buildings.

EDIT 2: If non-transparent pngs being uploaded for your use in constructing the Guild City map is going to be a problem I can act as a conversion machine and convert the CC3+ users files into transparent png files for you.

EDIT 3: (trying to keep the sheer number of comments down a bit) Another problem I can see we are going to have with shadows is where they might fall partly or all the way across a road. We might need to ignore that until all the sections are otherwise complete, and then ask someone very nicely if they will do a kind of seam tidying job - finishing the missing tops of the shadows.... OR.... we produce separate shadow masks for our own particular shadow areas, so that these can be overlaid on adjoining maps (might seem a bit rude to impose them like that, but it would help with healing the seam between different areas)

I expect that people with areas adjacent to the castle might find themselves overshadowed quit a lot, so should be made aware of that fact before they start mapping.

[Redrobes]

Makes no difference to me whether its a transparent PNG or a JPG or whatever. I would flatten the image with a solid background anyway.

I was planning to do the stitching the bits together and maybe volunteer to do all the inbetween sector roads for the city as a seam for the bits but I was waiting till we knew what kind of sectors are going to be designed. Maybe they wont all be roads etc and I may need something or somebody more artistic than myself. I can manage cobbled, paved or muddy roads tho.

Regarding shadows it almost seems like we need a 3D model of the tall stuff so as to generate the shadow map. Maybe we should map it without any strong shadows and apply an overalll shadow mask afterwards. Thats what we did for MeDem when we did that project.

[Mouse]

That's great news for the CC3+ users

That's a really good solution to the shadow situation. If we were all to produce a simple building outline map and add either numbers to indicate number of floors, or just key shades to indicate the same, would that work out all right?