I worked for BAE Systems once for about 6 weeks as a temp on the reception desk at our local office! LOL!

A far cry from what you get up to though ;)

Thanks for sharing your story :D

5 of each?

I'm going to try and make them open at the top so they will have whatever fill you put them on.

Maybe eventually. I'll have to add that to a wish list for the future, but there's no reason why not :)

Thank you! :)

I really don't think I'm a patch on HW. He hand drew all his symbols, and mine are about 50% modelled in 3D apps like Blender and ngPlant.

I will be moving on to Structures in the next couple of days. Have to keep the pace steady and do what's on the list, or things get unbalanced ;)

Thanks for letting us know, Quenten. I could have done with this about 4 months ago when I was scratching my head over the exact arrangement of houses in the first handful of Spectrum structure symbols. It's not as easy as you think, so I never went to Watabou because of the triangular houses. They would have been no good for what I wanted.

Now, though, this might take days off the workload.

I can download the 3D file and break up the model to rearrange the buildings like setting up for a college still life drawing. You know the sort of thing - 3 hours to draw a carrot, an onion and a chopping board in amazing photographic detail :) (That's what I had to do for my O'level 39 years ago).

I wouldn't say that was mundane!

You're like me, and lots of other people as well. We got on with life and made stuff along the way in those odd moments of time between all the busy stuff :)

Thanks for sharing!

Thank you, Farsight :)

Those are called varicolour symbols, and are generated after the original colour image by the addition of a second png file that denotes the areas that will change colour. If you look through the folders of artwork for the Mike Schley style you will see them. They look like ghost images of the original. These tend to be later additions to a symbol set. The fact that part 1 had varicolour structures was down to Ralf Schemmann generating the necessary files once I handed the set over to him.

I really can't say if there will be time to do more for part 2. That depends a lot on what Ralf has got on his plate in the last fortnight of October ;)

This is to do with extreme altitudes and data that isn't a number - Outliers and NANs.

The instructions on how to ensure your world is free of them are the last 2 paragraphs on page 10 and all of page 11 of the Supplemental Notes.

With hindsight I maybe should have put this in the main Mapping Guide, but at the time I didn't think these things affected unedited synthetic worlds. Isn't hindsight a wonderful thing!

Oh these are very interesting. Please do keep posting :)

Trees are always tricky things to get right. Their size seems to be a key issue, but whether you like them large or small the size of a tree will ultimately depend on what size you mean to use your map. There is no point in having trees that are too small to be easily identified as trees.

It is basically a good map, though you are missing a scale bar.

The one thing that may need a bit of tweaking is the placement of trees. What is the map telling us? I get the message that this is either dense jungle and covered all over by trees that are represented by the spaced out single trees, or that there are remarkably even copses of trees, each symbolised by a single tree. Since I don't know the scale I can't be sure which of these may be true.

If your area is only partly wooded (for example a forest that has been eaten into by agriculture, or which has large clearings of grassland) it may be communicated more effectively by creating clumps of trees as wooded areas.

Take a look at other maps and the way that other people have shown forest and jungle. If you think a different method might portray your area better, it may be time to reconsider the tree placement.