WIP - Senan
Glitch
Surveyor
Removed from his position by the Druids of Colaste for his anti-slavery position as well as his marriage to a Priestess, Count Fen has retreated to and fortified Senan. The Druids have cursed the land around Senan - turning once lush forests into "petrified" woods. Count Fen has found a way to harvest the petrified woods and started building a fleet of ships. To the north of Senan are retting fields used to create cloth for sails.
Just about 1/3 of the way through, comments and suggestions welcome.......
Comments
Interesting looking map so far.
The wall maybe looks a bit too perfectly circular for something apparently hastily constructed, and the interior also seems a little too "planned" in this regard. Typically with something rapidly fortified, there'll be houses, etc., that end up beyond the walls, or become demolished ruins (whose rubble then vanishes into the new walls!). Also, if the wall's quite new, few properties will have been built facing it so neatly, unless they too have been very recently (re)built. This ignores the problems or advantages because of terrain, naturally.
Some of the bitmap fills may need rescaling at some stage to avoid their repeating pattern being quite so obvious (the effect's accentuated currently because of the very fine-scale square grid, which makes it tricky to know which of the fills other than those at sea this might impact), and you might want to move the title box, as it's currently hiding part of those green segments of the undersea contours which presumably have some significance, given their limited extent.
Increasing the edge fade on the undersea contours would help blend the lines there, and you might want to redraw some of them using smooth polygons too, to lose those very sharp corners in places currently. The "Horsehead Nebula" deep water head looks good, although it probably shouldn't be cutting so directly through the shallower water contour near the shipyard.
Yikes! Started to make some changes. Specifically all I did was change the scale of two of the sea fills, deleted the deep sea poly and redrew - then transferred each to their own sheets. Now I'm finding that any change takes A LOT longer to redraw - last time it took over 5 minutes to come back to a working state. Tried turning off effects for just the "sea" sheets, but no change; every operation that generates a "redraw" now takes forever.
Any suggestions?
@DaltonSpence - yes, I need a new descriptor for the "petrified" wood. Still would require magic tools to harvest, but would result in an extra strong, fireproof hull.
You might need to share the FCW so we can have a look at it and see what might be slowing it down.
Thanks - I tried returning the scaling to original settings, but it seems to take even longer to work with.
Unfortunately I can't even open the map, CC3+ just idles endlessly. If you can open the map, can you hide everything? Just hide all the layers and all the sheets. Does that make the redraw managable?
Ralf - Thanks, I pulled up the file and ate dinner while it loaded. Hiding the sheets took doing dishes, but was finally done. I saved the file, then on impulse pulled up just one or two sheets - since they responded; I assumed that the problem was with the last poly I drew - sure enough opening the sheet took forever to process - so I found the guilty party. Once it loaded, I deleted the poly and redrew it. Things seem to be running better now.
Not sure what was wrong with the poly - it originally used Std Symbol Fill, I changed to a solid fill. The poly also seemed to have a "spiked" node that I dont recall drawing. So either the fill or a broken poly? In any event, I'm assuming user error, and am now back on track.
I'm going back to keeping a version backups - grandfather, father, and son...... Is this a practice that anyone else does?
Excellent, glad to hear it. And I certainly do staggered backups on important projects, highly recommended.
@Wyvern - Thanks! Great observations.
I agree on the city walls, but since this is the first time that I successfully used both trace and the symbol offset to create, I'm too proud of my efforts there! I'll try to offset by creating a second wall that is in process of building - maybe scattering buildings around the outside will also draw away from the prefect arc.
Redrew the deep water, corrected sizing on fills, and increased blur on water. Will post an updated version later today!
Glad you'd resolved the massive slow-down problem; hopefully it won't recur!
Yep, can quite understand why you don't want to redraw the walls! Maybe you could just add some "in-progress" building segments along it though, instead of drawing a whole new wall being built?
Made changes to fill scale, tore down some of the wall (south) and created a construction area. Added clutter outside the northern walls, and added the lumber camp. Needs a higher level of detail - but reached my point for the night......
Wouldn't petrified wood be too dense to build ships with? And it wouldn't be flexible or easy to carve. A lot of magic would be needed to make this workable and the right counter-spell might sink the whole fleet.
The density would not be a problem. It's the mass of the water you displace by the shape of the hull that determines whether something will float. A rock won't float. A carved out rock with the same mass will float.
Not much progress today, blocked in the "petrified trees", added some farms, resized and added lumber camp tents. I was going to correct the trench foundation construction - where it ran past the road, but decided that erosion happens at work sites, so I added wood to bridge the problem areas.
Construction zone laid out
Shipyards - forgot to turn on the edge fade on shallow waters.....
This mornings effort:
Detail from the Milling district:
I love the Australian feel to your city - no houses all joined together in rows like most European cities, especially those with a lot of medieval areas. Houses with backyards, space between each free standing house - what a dream.
seriously though, too many fantasy cities suffer from the layout of houses too far apart - for richer areas, yes, for ordinary folk, I think not. So while I absolutely love your city, it certainly isn't a medieval one. Much more like USA and Australian suburbia. In fact, in our not very old cities in Australia, the inner suburbs are still all houses cheek to cheek.
Good point - this is what happens when a Midwest Accountant suddenly decides that he can map.....nice neat layout with linear features.
So to pivot, I'll say that the area south of the river is "Old Town" and will try to make it a more realistic presentation. Will also move and adjust some of the existing buildings in the Shipyards and Milling Districts. The upper section will be the "wealthy" district.
I really appreciate the observation! Growing up in the US - particularly in the Midwest we have allot of green space (I'm now building a house in a area that requires a minimum of 1/2 acre per lot to facilitate septic..), and the major roads were I live are actually a well laid out grid.
Increased density, minor shifts in size and color. Still looking too planned. Thinking of moving or deleting some of the large warehouses in order to move roads in an attempt to make it look more organic? Should the building be actually touching each other?
I really think people should look at buildings in the inner city - so long as it is not a modern city. Buildings do touch each other all the time, often even in villages. I think the too dense criticism is unwarranted because we are so used to having so much space around our buildings now.
And I do agree about the walls extending into the water. Or at least no land between them and the water.
This mornings efforts:
Warehouse District:
Lumber Camp:
Started to add some wonkie-ness to the walls (once it was pointed out, the arc was all I could see). Moved the lumber camp, fussed with the Warehouse district. Added some street names to help identify building use - particularly to indicate homes where seafarers and stevedores would live. Needs more LOD, but my computer is starting to slow down already
On building density - after consideration I have a couple of thoughts:
If you build a fortified city- you will want to protect as many people as possible.
It probably is more realistic to have buildings against the walls - but from a military standpoint, I have problems with that so, street
Last and most important, roof top senarios!
Question: I usually work with the Sheet Effects on - it helps me visualize what I'm doing, the trade off is a slowdown in redrawing time. Are there Sheet Effects that are more memory intensive then others? I could try turning them off for work, and back on for rendering.