August/September 2017 Challenge: Planets of hats

[Azélor]

My take on the challenge is to try to include all the challenges in one map, or as many as possible. I will use a space map for this.
There are 18 challenges.


Let's begin with the general ones:

1. Lost in space. Obvious, this is a space map.
   
2. Fill a gap in time and space. A room or a space with no window and no exit: the universe. I will also include a black hole not to look like I'm lazy.
   
3. GOLD, GOLD, GOLD!
4. Political: Eight planets as members of a federation; each has a flag or symbol.
5. Trading: The planets are linked by an FTL system with jump gates. That is like a trade route.
   
6. Built of a word (3 words): eight, black, broken. I can have 8 different planets. The space is dark if that counts as black and there is a black hole. Broken is pretty vague. At least I can have one of the three.

Part 1

7. In the beginning, the campaign starter: The character starts in a tavern. It is made with...

8. fun with isometrics

part 1.jpg

I did not include the latest wip thing because it's just one part of the map. The rest of the story will continue as other parts gets added.
It's the first time I do an interior isometric map.

[Azélor]

Part 2
Using sketchup

9. Urban mapping: A city map following the plan.

plan respected copie.jpg

10. Turning it on its side: The map is a front view.
11. Verticality: must have at least 5 floors

Also, there are some elements of gothic architecture and GOLD.

part 2.jpg

[Azélor]

Part 3 (In progress)

12. Local map. Earth, I assume most people on the forum live there.

part3.jpg

I'm not sure about the style I will use.
I can either go for more linework/cartoon like Le Petit Prince or Mario Galaxy.
Or something more realistic with smoother color/lines and more atmospheric effects. See Endless Space 2 planets for example:
https://pcgamesnnews.files.wordpress...25_1.jpg?w=700

[Mouse]

That Endless Space example is beautiful, but it could look just as good either way.

Great city!

[ChickPea]

Wow, I take my hat off to you for incorporating all 18 challenges! Great start.

[Azélor]

My hard drive is dying and I ordered a new one. It was making a tick tick noise and became frozen. It's still working but unreliable. I managed to finish the back ups and everything should be fine.

Anyone here using sdd or hybrid drives?

[Mouse]

Oh that's a horrible thing to start happening at any time!

I don't like SDD. The only camera I had that malfunctioned was built around an SDD. I didn't do anything too it - no excessive heat or cold, no moisture, and in fact only ever took a couple of hundred pics with it, but it suddenly decided not to work about 18 months after I bought it - taking all those pics with it (I hadn't gotten around to downloading them)

Of course, traditional spinning drives can also be temperamental, and I should know since I used to burn them out for a pastime in my old PC, but in my personal experience they are better than SDD - especially when used as part of a RAID system, which automatically backs up data moment by moment on a secondary built in drive - it was a twin drive PC. Replacing faulty hard drives in a RAID system can turn out to be very expensive, though, which is why I gave up with it in the end, and now rely on a simple laptop and an external HDD.

I do hope this isn't going to hamper your mapping too much!

[niekell]

Hello Azelor,

I have a varied array of storage mediums currently. I have a SSD Caching drive 30GB doing the caching for a 500GB mechanical HDD. This makes cached data almost as fast as a pure SSD, but allows 500GB of space and when I need to pull up something not cached it is no slower than a pure mechanical HDD. I have however run into a size issue lately where the 500GB isn't enough. Unfortunately the hybrid 4TB WD Red required UEFI Bios and my motherboard is many years old with only EFI. So I cloned in preparation to switch over but had to abort the process until I upgrade the motherboard (and CPU).
I back up to an external WD 2TB myBook but I've had one of those fail on me so the off-site (at work) back up saved me in that instance though it was older data.
I have had SSDs fail, but it's usually when attempting to use them rather than over time. One brand had several SSDs fail in a row and in the end I just wrote off the cost and gave up with the returns policy.
I find SSDs fine, but backup no matter if its an SSD or HDD is essential in my book.

Best wishes, niekell

[Redrobes]

I use SSD but its mainly because they have no spinny noise and draw less power so less system fan noise as well. My little desktop is tiny and almost silent. I back up onto several USB3 spinny HDDs. I have not had issues with SDDs and generally not had too much problem with HDDs as well but had a couple of failures and sometimes I had PCs blow up taking the HDDs out. USB external drives is definitely the way to go tho. I treat my system SSD as a big cache ready for backups rather than the actual master content.

I am amazed that a ticking HDD is still useable. Normally that is the sound of terminal failure.

Sometimes I take the platters out of old HDDs and use them as mug coasters. Also the magnets in them are fun to play with.

[Azélor]

The ticking is not constant but when it starts, the computer becomes unresponsive.

If I close it manually and restart it's fine at the begining but evetually crash again.

I began having problems a few months ago when donwloading larger files. I received odd error messages like it was impossible to reach the server. The problem also occured when starting apps like Word so it must be because the hdd is damaged.