Britannia, from the Ultima Games

[Hai-Etlik]

map.png

A revised version of my Britannia map which I made years ago, one of my first serious attempts at a map.

I've aimed for the period between Ultima 6 and Ultima 7, although the geometry is mostly from the Ultima 5 map. There are elements gleaned from Ultimas 4-7, 9, and Ultima Online.

I started out in Quantum GIS by tracing my old map, switched to OpenJUMP to convert the data to a format I could load into JTS easily, and then processed it though some custom software written in Java using the JTS library. That produced an SVG image with the stipples and an initial tree and mountain placement. I loaded the result into Inkscape to clean up the positioning and add further elements like the labels, and whatnot. The basic algorithm I used is as described in this paper presented at SIGGRAPH 2006 which uses Wang Tiles for high speed blue noise generation. I didn't implement the recursive aspect though as I didn't need it.

The symbols were all either drawn in Inkscape, printed in light blue at 5 times their final size, inked with a sharpie pen, scanned, cleaned up in GIMP, and then auto-traced in Inkscape. Or I drew them directly on paper with a coloured pencil, and then inked and scanned them the same way.

The small font was created the same way: I printed a sheet with reference boxes, wrote in the runes in sharpie, scanned, traced. picked loaded the result into Fontforge, and then largely used automatic metrics generation as I'm not really a typography expert. I did manage to build some ligature substitution for the combination runes like TH and NG. The larger double struck lettering was just improvised over top of the basic one scaled up and doesn't exist as a font. You can find a translation key here.

Most of the games are available on GOG, and Ultima 4 is available for free. I highly recommend them if you haven't played them, except U8 and U9 which were horrible. 4+5+6, 7, 4 (Free)