Hey guys.

Sorry i haven't give any news from a while neither.
My website is down, cause i changed my ... (i miss the english word), you know the organisation which grants you access to the Internet (FAI in french).

Moreover, i subscribed to the topic and had no news... But, i'm back. I saw Thorf you were looking for the HTML codes. I'll try to make a zip with everything and put it somewhere you can get it. However, i think i will put back on the Internet all your files and the nice structure made once.

I'm glad to see the discussions starting again...

By the Way... Happy New Year

Happy New Year to you too! Nice to hear from you again.

So you changed your Internet service provider? I see.

I have been working on a little mapping again. Which reminds me - thanks everyone for the comments/suggestions/corrections in this thread on the last page. Don't worry, I haven't forgotten you completely, I'll get to instituting corrections sooner or later.

The good news is that I am getting towards finding a workaround for the problems discussed on the last page about showing neighbouring nations on each map. I hope I can get things finalised soon, so keep an eye out.

I have quite a few maps to add to the collection, and I'm also in the process of updating a lot of things. It occurs to me that I have yet to upload most of my existing maps with my new palette, and in fact in general the maps online are quite out of date. So I'm going to be working towards fixing that over the next wee while.

New maps will be posted to the end of the thread, but you might also want to check out the first post in the thread for updates.

The original version of the Serpent Peninsula from X6. The deep water will be useful for my latest maps.

The original map of the Savage Coast. I for one am very happy that Bruce Heard redeveloped the whole area! It's so empty...

Still, this map is interesting. It seems that Bruce kept most of the old landmarks and place names in his redesign.

This is one of two evil, evil maps which have their hexes at a 90 degree angle from all other maps. (The other is
the 6 mile per hex map of the Isle of Dread in X1.) HWA3's map has one saving grace, which is that, though
the hexes are angled the wrong way, the art is the same as normal. In other words, they just made the top
of the hexes west, rather than rotating the art inside the hexes (as X1 does...).

But I still hate it.

First, the map:



Next, here is a clear graphical rendition of why this map drives me mad - in case anyone couldn't work out
what I've been going on about.



I swear, by the time I'm finished those strange hex patterns are going to be etched into my mind. I'll probably
have nightmares about them.

In the interests of accuracy to the original maps, you mispelt "harbor" on the Savage Coast map.

Hehehe. That's the automatic spellchecker in my head at work.

Take a look at the new format on the Alfheim and Darokin maps. It's extremely time consuming to do (i.e. it takes a lot of computer chugging and waiting), but the results are not bad. I will probably tweak things a bit more before settling on a final format, though.

Thorf,

You show a town in Alfheim named "Ainsu". I'm no expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I thought the name was "Ainsun". Which is right?

BTW, have you updated the Legend since changing your palete?

Love the new maps!

Gordon

Good catch, Gordon. It looks like I made a typo on my original map, because as you say all the sources have Ainsun.

Strangely enough, yesterday I too found a similar error on one of my maps from early last year - Glantri had "Huldeain Camp" instead of Huledain Camp. It's funny that no one saw these until now, because the maps have been around for more than a year.

Anyway, corrections are always welcome. Thanks!



I don't think the Legend has been updated for quite a while. In fact I bet it doesn't even have the Milenian symbols from HWR3. I'll try and do it soon. I also should really do legends for a couple of other maps, too - I've been stalling on them for way too long.

I updated the Legend...



...and added this other one...



...and this one.



The latter I have not really started to use yet, but I may decide to in the future.

With your cleaned and updated maps, perhaps you can switch out the symbol for the Capital of a state for the normal symbol for a settlement of its size, but colored red instead of black. Thus, you can tell at a glance that not only is it the capital, but also what size of settlement it is...

You can then use the symbol originally used for "Capital" in a black rather than red color as "Large City" or "Metropolis" of 50,000+. In a case where it is also the capital, of course, then it would also be red, not black...

Well, it didn't drive me mad.

But it was a bit irritating having to redo all those plateaus and salt marshes. (They take hours to do. Literally.)



Please go ahead and compare the two maps, and tell me what you think.

I have considered doing just that. In fact at one stage I tried it out on the familiar Gazetteer maps. But somehow it changes the feel of the maps in a way that I don't like. And it makes the present capital symbol rather rare, too.

If I were mapping a new world from scratch, I would probably want to go with a system like that, but for Mystara I am sticking to the old capital symbol. For now.

I will certainly keep it in mind for a variations series, though. People seem to like having some choice, though I don't have the server space to maintain a lot of variations permanently.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestion.

Lovely maps as usual Thorf! Seeing these on these boards on a monday morning made it easier to get this week started. Truly inspirational!

Hmmm... I still wonder what stage II is...

Håvard

I concur - it even made me forget my cold for an hour or so.

Maybe an interactive map, were if you click on a place it would bring up a gazeteer type entry for it?

Anyway it's great to see new maps, Thorf.

Regards
Gary

Thorf,

Did you ever get a copy of the Baldur font from the Mad Irishman with accented characters?

If not I may just have to bite the bullet and buy and modify the existing font. I did something similar with a Dalelands font -adding accented characters and fractions etc.

Regards
Gary

Gary... As I fianlly crawl off to bed, you are definitely not popular with my wife tonight. Or should I say this morning.

...or at least that's as it should be - she doesn't know it's your fault, unfortunately.

(This one is not quite finished... Still needs a couple of trails and some tweaking.)

Check out the first page index for the rest! (And there are quite a few, though they are basically just components of this one.)

You would not believe the number of mistakes I found while checking every single name on all those maps to put in the accents.

When I originally did my Princess Ark maps, I didn't have access to Red Steel at all, and although I had two copies of each map from Dragon, both were reasonably low quality scans - one from Thibault's site, the other from the Dragon PDFs. This meant that it was impossible for me to check (or indeed read, sometimes) many of the names, and so a huge number of mistakes crept in.

Amazing that no one noticed. But then again, most of them involved miscellaneous villages and other locations, so no one would notice the difference unless they did a direct comparison.

Incidentally, I actually have had the updated font for quite a while now (Patrick from Mad Irishman Productions came through for me!), but it's such a huge job adding in all those accents that I had almost nothing posted yet.

As such, don't expect to be seeing the rest of the maps all that soon, okay? I imagine there will be just as many mistakes, so the whole lot will need checked.

Well, that really is all from me. Good night!

Oops! Sometimes I forget about time differences.

Its good to hear about the updated font though, I really should get round to buying it. In fact...

Regards
Gary

Ditto. Where can I get this thing?

Håvard

Try here

Regards
Gary

A word of caution - I don't think Patrick has updated the font that he has for sale yet. If you're interested, I would suggest that you send him an e-mail asking about it. It doesn't matter if you do it before or after buying it, although being a paying customer might give you more leverage.

Anyway it's only $12 or so, right?

In related news, I recently obtained a copy of Furst, which is one of the other fonts quoted on the TSR Font FAQ page. We know that the original font was Feinen Bold, but that site also lists FC-Feinen and Furst.

In any case, I am not sure about the legality of this font, since someone sent it to me, which is almost certainly not legal. But it's interesting to see the difference between it, Baldur, and the Feinen (as shown on the original maps). They are ever so slightly different. Also Furst includes a non-bold version, which I'm not sure I had seen before.

I will continue to use Baldur, though, since I know that it's legal. Well, assuming that clones are in fact 100% legal, that is... Fonts are such a tricky business, and I really don't know how the law applies in these cases.

What indeed?

Gary, your idea is not all that far off, really. But I'm thinking more along the lines of a book format than an interactive format.

Obviously, the subject involves maps heavily, but it's more than just that.

I'd downloaded the font from Myfonts just before you posted, and no it hasn't been updated yet. I've also sent Patrick an email.


or £7 in proper money.


Now if it wasn't illegal I'd...

Of course if I win the lottery then its Feinen Bold all the way.


I think clones are okay as long as they aren't identical copies.

Regards
Gary

He specifically asked me not to distribute it, or I would update you myself.



Yes, otherwise known as 1400 yen for me. I work in pounds and yen, generally, but dollars are easy enough to work out too.


I'm pretty sure Furst is a foundry-owned font, so the copy I got sent is dodgy indeed.


Gary, if you win the lottery, you can buy us a multiple user licence. I'll pay you back for it in the form of new maps.

You might remember that we seriously discussed the possibility of buying it earlier in this thread. I'm still up for it if we can find enough people to get the price down.


I'm not so sure. At best they are probably a very grey area.

Let's face it, they definitely take money away from the original font creators. That alone makes them ethically questionable. In the end, they are copies of someone else's work.

Getting to have a look at Furst made me realise that even if we do eventually buy Feinen, we will probably be in for a let-down. The differences between Feinen, Furst and Baldur are so small as to be insignificant.

Do you mean 10.25 ? ? I'm not sure i got it

By the way still awesome maps Thorf... So glad you're posting new ones. You did a great job on the 90°-turned one. Really great.

Hehe. Anyone else want to translate that for us? I'm sure there are people on the list who use other currencies still.


Thanks. It was quite hard work, though still pretty fun. It wasn't quite as hard as I thought it might be, although the inaccuracy introduced by the conversion is a little frustrating.

Did anyone tried once to print all the maps and placing all of them on the floor, like a really great map... ?

I wander which size it could be...

Go away silly idea... Go away before i'm back at home... Go away !!!