User talk:Chénier/Mapping BattleMaster

I tried to manually do something like this a while back with the Atlas of Atamara, and am currently developing a formal geographical nomenclature for Dwilight. I'd love to see any of your work on those. The problem I encountered for some interesting data was a problem of regions of nonuniform size: it's hard to do a "persons per square mile" when you don't have the square miles of a region, so that a large, heavily-populated region (as we have no more localized data) ends up looking like a huge densely populated area. But I guess you probably have the tools to solve that. I'd love to see a good population density map, as well as a GDP per capita map, food per capita, etc. Vellos 06:33, 17 November 2010 (CET)

Cool stuff. I'm not sure how to do the density without a surface variable, but I'm 99.5% sure that if I look for it, I'll find a way for the software to automatically calculate polygon size and then be able to normalize population size by that. One of the variables that interest me the most is finding out region's maximum required estate settings, with which many calculations can be done to help realm planning. Problem is that will be the hardest variable to acquire. If you want a glimpse of what kind of maps I'd be doing, you can see a (non-BM) example here [1] (that was just quickly done for the fun of it, I know it should have a scale on there). I can make the polygons transparent and put the continent's image in the background, though, if it's desired for visual reasons. Region borders will inevitable be a little blocky, though, as using curved lines tends to be too risky for topology reasons, and therefore straight lines connecting all the vertexes are used. -Dominic "Chénier" 18:31, 18 November 2010 (CET)

I think that the easiest way to do a surface variable would be, as you said, calculate the areas of the regions by assigning some arbitrary scale. Alternatively, distances from one region to another can be found in game, and you could then take that mile value and translate it into a scale across the whole continent. Obviously borders would not be as clean, as you said, but that would hardly be a problem with a little transparency. Vellos 20:46, 18 November 2010 (CET)

The software will obviously tell me that it doesn't recognize the projection used, which will be normal as it is not something on earth. However, even with mere "unknown units" (which will be calculated by the pixels, I believe), I should be fine. Travel distances would be more trouble than it is worth, I believe. -Dominic "Chénier" 21:02, 18 November 2010 (CET)