Nimia

[Protopop]

This is an interactive map I'm developing for my fantasy world Nimia. http://nimiaworld.com

Nimia is actually the name of the main continent. The world map cover one half of the planet, known as Ril.

I'd like to work on adding details such as mountains and more icons for places of interest.

It was difficult to handle the file - its 8192x8192 pixels. Now that I've figured that out i will be updating it. It's the backdrop for a new game I'm working on called Nimian Hunter Salvation (http://facebook.com/nimianhunter) which is the sequel to a flash game Nimian Hunter.

nimian-map.jpg

[arsheesh]

Gotta say, that's looking pretty nice! Welcome to the Guild Protopop and have some rep for your hard work.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Protopop]

Thank you Arsheesh. I'm still learning about rep and my way around. I feel like you gave me some gold coins! Much appreciated.

It's funny because I don't think of myself as a cartographer. But seeing all the work here and a whole forum of people devoted to the art of cartography makes me realize how it is an important part of game and world building - a discipline in itself, not just an adjunct or afterthought to it.

[Protopop]

I've added a version of the map with borders so we can see the individual kingdoms. I actually need to find a better word than 'Kingdoms' for these divisions because they are not all monarchys. Clicking the drop down on the top right of the map let's you switch between 'border' view and 'satelitte' view. http://nimiaworld.com

nimia-borders.jpg

[damonjynx]

What program did you create the map in? It's really good.

[Seraphine_Harmonium]

That satellite view map is just great. The amount of detail you put into it is really amazing. My one critique is that the coastlines in some places are very pixelated looking. If you could smooth those parts out it would be perfect.

[Protopop]

What program did you create the map in? It's really good.

Thank you Damonjnyx.

The outline is created in Illustrator. Here i crated the coastlines, the country borders, and figured out the names of each place. Working with vectors here is nice because i can zoom in and out easily.

I gathered high resolution satellite images and used photoshop's "content aware fill" to remove any lines or abberations in the textures.

I used Bitmap2Material to create seamless high resolution textures for the different landscapes. You can also use the seamless texture filter in GIMP

I brought the illustartor outline into photoshop and used it as a mask for the textures, and brought the textures together in photoshop. I usually use Fireworks, but it was just crashing. Photoshop seemed to handle the multilayered 8192x8192 file better.

All the text is added outside the map in html. To create the actual panning and zooming map I used this incredible open source map javascript library called Leaflet http://leaflet.cloudmade.com/

[Protopop]

My one critique is that the coastlines in some places are very pixelated looking. If you could smooth those parts out it would be perfect.

Thanks for the critique - its the push i need to fix that

I sampled the coastlines from bitmap images of real coasts. Thus the pixels.

Im going to go into illustrator with my original map and zoomin, then start smoothing out those jagged edges.

I appreciate it.

And thank you for the Rep! very cool of you

[hudster]

This looks fantastic! The level of detail is excellent. Great work.

[jbwncster]

any basic tutorials on how to do this?