Yes, this is a silly question

[bruno_bac]

How I make a map? I savad a Photoshop hand made map as a targa 24bit format, then opened with the map editor, but it shows the region white banners everywhere... where I don't want them. I don't manage to move them, I can't do anything at all. Reading the help PDF, it seems all so easy, seems you can just do whatever you need... hardly any attention is given to the making of the map, so I think it's REALLY easy and there's a gross misunderstanding on my part.

Someone is so kind to enlighten me?
Thanks in advance...

Bruno.

[Endoperez]

Every pure white pixel (255,255,255) is considered a province. The players might think of it as only a center of a province, but for the game, everything else is just fluff. If you happen to have lots of white pixels around, every one of them in considered a province. You have to change them to merely look like white.

Photoshop, of course, has tools for choosing all the white pixels at once. It can be used to select areas of similar color, but if you just set the tolerance to zero and main color to white, it will select all pure white pixels and nothing more. Then change the color (255, 255, 255) to (*254*, 255, 255) or so, and you will have no capitals. Then you have to manually re-enter them. The map editor of DomII can't add these pixels, it just helps you to connect neighbours and choose terrains when the map is ready.

[bruno_bac]

Ok now I will try... by the way, this was NOT in the manual... was it?
Thank you for your help!

[Endoperez]

Probably not. And I couldn't find it from the the mapedit.pdf located in \Dominions II\doc\ . It does contain much information for how to make some provinces special, adding sites or special defenders, spesifing independent type for a province, spesifying start locations etc. If you were to make that kind of version of your map available, you would better also include a version with no specials except start locations, so that it is more accessible in multiplayer.

[bruno_bac]

I would really make the map available (where to post it?) if I can finish it... Right now I found a white 2 pixel spot, meaning a duplicate province, when editing region borders and data. It messed all my work. Do you Photoshop-using guys know of a system to be certain (when you click with the pencil) to leave ONLY one white pixel on the map?
Thanks for answering, everyone.
Bruno

[Kaljamaha]

bruno_bac said:
I would really make the map available (where to post it?) if I can finish it...



You can post it in this forum, just attach it to your post. The limit is 30 Mb, if I remember correctly. Any reasonable sized (compressed) targa should fit in that, and the space the map file takes up is negligible.


Right now I found a white 2 pixel spot, meaning a duplicate province, when editing region borders and data. It messed all my work. Do you Photoshop-using guys know of a system to be certain (when you click with the pencil) to leave ONLY one white pixel on the map?




Zoom in real close and check? What I did was have one layer where I would place black circles to mark provinces, sort of slap them in where I thought appropriate. Then, on another layer on top of that, place the actual provinces, that is, the 255,255,255 pixels. The dark background helps to see the white dot, and also spot any anomalies. When you're happy, just turn the layer with the black circles invisible.

Also, at least in GIMP (and therefore, I would assume also in Photoshop) there's a tool that counts the pixels of each color on the current layer. Use it to see if the number matches your province count.


K.

Edit: typos

[bruno_bac]

Thanks, the idea of the black spots is really useful (I will learn to use layers, too).

Let's see if I can do it....

[Endoperez]

You could also make a new brush that makes 1 white pixel with 4 pixels of another color (I think dark would work better than light). This would make the capital pixels more visible even without extra layers, and while playing. The Faerun maps' capitals are done this way, IIRC.

[Edi]

The Faerun map's capitals are done by painting a star around the white spot (a solid ring of full 0, 0, 0 black and then adding single pixels at the cardinal compass points). Did those by hand and then copy-pasted an entire 5x5 block into the palces where I wanted them.

Edi