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Message: <blockquote data-quote="sunbeam60" data-source="post: 414103" data-attributes="member: 6528">Well in that case <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Here is how I started it up:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Draw the coastlines on a sketch</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Scan the coastline in</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Fill in coastline with pencil tool (or whatever equivalent)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Draw swamps and other "low" terrain types. Drawing these first will later cover them over with other terrain, which seems to give the best result.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Draw mountains (I usually draw these in the middle of the contininents/islands, as these will tend to "bulge" up from crust shifts.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Draw forests</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Draw rivers (they will flow on top of mountains, forests and all other terrain</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">In order, do roads (goes over rivers), icons (cities, fortresses, places of interest), names and place names Generally I have a layer for each, which is quite memory intensive, but it makes it easy to delete from something without touching the other stuff. In PSP, which is the program I use (and I am sure CPP has something similar), I can lock transparencies in a layer. This means that the "alpha" value of each pixel in that layer will remain constant, ie. you cannot draw new stuff, but you can draw over old stuff in this layer. This allows me to copy-paste large patterns over the forests, mountains, deserts etc and not having to worry about the edges of these terrain types. The patterns I do in some other file and then just copy it into the map-file. Now I know a lot will use CC2, but I am really no fan of it. I was really used to PSP, so if you feel the same about CPP, then just stick with that, IMHO. Last ingredient: Patience. Mine took 3 years and it is still not complete. Instead of dropping out of the project, I just went back to it whenever my RPG itch was getting to me. Also, if you do really large maps, then break them down into smaller files. As the amount of layers grow, the memory requirements get steep. I started mine on a 64 MB machine and had to use really small segments. This made it somewhat hard to join the segments together to align roads and rivers perfectly, so if you are serious, then invest in memory. Which goes for all graphic work, I think. Hope this rant was useful <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Cheers Toft [/list=1]</li> </ol></blockquote>

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