Map The Eight Gates

Zylithan · #1 September 27th, 2007, 01:32 AM

Here's a preview of the nodes for four of the eight flavors of gates (clockwise from top left, water,fire,air,earth).

Each of the 8 nodes can be reached by 5 gates scattered across the world. I'll show a clip of the overland map and the gates next.

Zylithan · #2 September 27th, 2007, 02:10 AM

Here's a preview of the overland map (without province borders). It's a swampy area with 4 flavors of gates visible. Clockwise from top left: water, life, blood (the pool of blood at the bottom), astral. The blood gates look different from the other 7 flavors of gate because blood magic is different from the 7 other types of magic in dom3.

(The thing in the middle is just decoration.)

Gameplay-wise, there are five gates of each of the 8 flavors scattered across the overland map. If you step into any of the five pools of blood on the overland map, you are brought to the blood node (which looks like the four nodes in the post above, except blood themed). In the blood node, you can exit through any blood pool. If you stay in the blood node (or any node) too long, you will have bad things happen to you. Depending on which of the .map files you play with (I'll provide 3?) you might also be able to recruit blood mages (other mages for other nodes) in the blood node. The other seven flavors of gates all function the same way.

Burnsaber · #3 September 27th, 2007, 02:29 AM

Sounds very, very cool.

I'm looking forward to it.

zepath · #4 September 27th, 2007, 02:38 AM

Awesome stuff Zylithan! Something about your artwork reminds me of the old Lords of Magic. What are you drawing with, by the way?

Sombre · #5 September 27th, 2007, 06:16 AM

Was that made using age of wonders tools?

DigitalSin · #6 September 27th, 2007, 06:36 AM

Ahh! *Wants to play*

Edi · #7 September 27th, 2007, 10:19 AM

Quote:

Sombre said:
Was that made using age of wonders tools?

Yes. AoW2 or AoW:SM by the looks of it.

Zylithan · #8 September 27th, 2007, 12:39 PM

Thanks for the curiousity.

Edi is correct. I'm using Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic to make the maps... actually, I'm using a community mod that adds a lot more graphics to the map editor (I think its called Unofficial Patch 1.4). AoW:SM is a great TBS 4x game I think, and I found about about dom3 on forums for that game.

Afer I build the map, I stitch it together in powerpoint, then import to gimp and make layers for the provinces, and edit some of the graphics a little (blood pools are actually water pools originally, and I think I'll try to make air, water, astral nodes look more different, as they are too hard to tell apart in my opinion.)

I'm not sure if I will continue to use AoW:SM for maps after this one. It is rather time intensive, and while the graphics are pretty, I'm not sure if I like the feel/scale. I think my maps show individual mountains and trees more, whereas most dom3 map (and hence, my impression of what they should look like) show forests and mountain ranges. I do think this package would be great for a Single Player map, as there are SO MANY cool graphics that could be used for special sites. But I'm not using those really (aside from the gates).

If you have opinions about the look of this map, let me know. I'll hiatus after finishing this guy, but after that I'll decide whether to switch platforms before my next map I think.

Gandalf Parker · #9 September 27th, 2007, 12:39 PM

I was recognizing that also. I kept meaning to mess with that mapgen. Great mapgen altho I would probably have to generate a whole bunch of them and paste them together.

I also kept meaning to go to the forums for it and see if the devs there have provided any pages of the tiles for some of the special things they use in the maps. It would be great to offer it here.