Finally updated the maps, don't think I'll get into any other modding stuff, but at least I can share this if anyone else cares to make use of it. These are maps made with the aim of not being too horribly large, yet still having accurate distances and proportions in terms of seeing what's where, as far as river fords and settlements, etc go. The only mountains, water and forests on the maps are impassable areas.
The blocky script denotes any settlement that starts the game with stone walls. Everything else is in hobbit cursive.
Unfortunately, rivers and bridge/ford visibility got a bit mangled in some spots due to overlapping borders or filters. Oh well.
There are three versions. The first map is color coded by starting areas and includes city names. The second has no color coding. The third has no color coding or city names, if anyone wants to have a blank map to work with.
Enjoy.
Full map:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Cities only map, no faction colors:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Blank map, no faction colors or cities:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Outdated (original post) below, ignore.
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
I wanted some maps to help me plan strategies, so I spent some time with the game files, and worked them into what we have here. These maps are therefor fairly accurate representations of the actual game map in terms of coordinates/positions and the features which they actually do show, including all settlements, rivers, and the larger mountain and forest ranges. Light blue spots on rivers are crossable fords. The first map may be a little more accurate with geographical features, but the second one shows region borders and starting areas. The only thing they're really missing imo are roads. Maybe some day I'll add those. (Don't count on it.) Anyway, hope someone else out there finds them useful or gets a kick out of them.
Note: The very thick rivers do not show fords properly. The thick river sections also got blanked out partly in the "political" map. This should only affect the stretch from Barad Harn to Caras Galadhon. Thanks to Vifarc to point out this error.
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
This one I made to test some filters and such, it's just a variation of the first one.
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Last edited by Twist of Cain; July 06, 2011 at 07:53 AM.
That is actually rather amazingly useful for starting out with this mod, thanks. The super big regions in Eriador [especially Rhudaur] make spies a necessary step to settlement finding... this helps a bunch in getting a rough idea of where things are.
Cool contribution to these boards. I can see a lot of AARs use the maps for explaining plans of attack and adding some flavour overall to the story and experience.
Man is but a shadow of his former self, encased in feverish delusions of grandeur. Ignorance is your shield, knowledge is your weapon. Heart without reason is stupid, reason without heart is blind.
Hey, its "Redeeming" itself, Season One was great! And now I have seen the first two episodes (or one if you missed the tv listings) I think it is great so far. Time will tell if it gets better or worse.
Sorry about off-topicness but at least the thread stays at the front!
There is a ford to the East river between Cerin Amroth and Tirith Anduin.
You missed to light-blue this. I think more must have been forgotten, but good map. +rep
Last edited by Vifarc; January 11, 2010 at 10:14 PM.
> > Divide&Conquer submod user, playing RealmOfLothlõrien (ThirdAge mod). < < My small products here.
There is a ford to the East river between Cerin Amroth and Tirith Anduin.
You missed to light-blue this. I think more must have been forgotten, but good map. +rep
That's odd, since I based these off the same .tga files which are normally used to build the actual map in-game. Perhaps I bungled in photoshop and brushed something over. I'll look at it, thanks for pointing this out!
Edit: Completely left out the fords on the larger river bodies, not sure how I missed that. Additionally, the filters used to create the political map kinda wiped out some of the rivers too, oh well, it's not supposed to be more geographically accurate, that's what the first one was for. I'll get around to fixing all this. Maybe.
Last edited by Twist of Cain; January 12, 2010 at 12:20 AM.
Here's a very general way of how to go about making these.
The files used as the basis are found in data\world\maps\base of your mod directory.
map_regions.tga has the political borders and city locations.
map_features.tga has rivers and fords.
map_ground_types.tga has terrain types, most importantly impassable mountains and impassable forests.
map_heights has elevations if you want to incorporate that.
First of all, copy all of these into another folder so you don't mess with your original files.
Resize them all until they are the size you want the final map to be. Use the most basic resizing so it doesn't round edges etc. We will fix the blocky edges later, right now we want everything as accurate as possible.
You can use filters on map_regions to isolate cities and borders. The right combinations of filters will give you something nearly identical to the "paintable map" in this thread. It's been a while and I do not remember which filters exactly, but try "glowing edges" and black/white settings in photoshop pro.
Now that you have the borders and these are all the same size, you can use the magic wand tool to highlight the interesting features from each one... then paste the features into a completely new image (paste "in place" to make sure their positions match up) with a layer for each so you can tweak them individually. Elevation first, then the impassable mountains and forests layer above that, then rivers and fords, and lastly the political borders and city points on top. (Later you will add the city name layer above this.)
Also do a search on how to create an "old parchment" effect with the cloud filters. It's very simple to get what looks like a piece of old-style blank parchment. Create one of the same size as the other files. After you do this, add this as a layer on the very bottom.
Once you have them overlaying each other and correctly aligned, you want to use filters to give it a nicer, non-pixelly, mappy look. Poster edges and then the cutout filter in photoshop are good ones, with the right settings, but experiment with others to get nice effects. You may need to merge/flatten all the layers together in order to get good effects; make sure you save your file in a pre-flattened version and remember what filters you end up using. This way you have a version to go back to where you can edit an individual layer and then just reapply the filters.
After all this is done and you like the look, you'll have to add the names of cities and I recommend adding a layer to color political borders by faction, so you can tweak the transparency of the color or add other effects individually more easily.
Think that covers all the steps! Have fun.
Last edited by Twist of Cain; August 14, 2011 at 08:21 PM.
Thank you very much,
In fact as a beginner I would just start by drawing a paintable map like you linked, with a non-pixelly look it would be just great, then I will add other features like rivers, etc.
I'm actually a beginner with Photoshop, and glowing edges seems good, is there any mean to remove the colors ?
For a start I think I wil just put some borders around the regions in map_regions.tga, and remove the colors to print it easily.
Some Game Maps
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Defo gonna use this :p
Originally Posted by Kamakai
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Re: Some Game Maps
Perhaps I bungled in photoshop and brushed something over. I'll look at it, thanks for pointing this out!
