Psst ... New resources for scenario makers

Harlan · September 18, 2001, 12:07

Hi,
I've been collecting maps for a long time. With Civ3 coming out soon, I've decided to make a lot of them available to help scenario makers out. Hopefully this will help make scenarios achieve a higher level of quality than in Civ2.

I've thrown them up onto a website, which you can check out at:
http://www.earthisland.org/borneo/other/index.html

However, there are several problems. The first is that the site is now on my work website, and can't stay there for long! Markos, I've emailed you several times about hosting it on Apolyton, but haven't heard back. If anyone else has hosting ideas, I'm all ears, and need something fast.

Second problem is that 99% of the images there are probably trampling copyright laws, so I'd appreciate it if you keep this website low key, and don't link to it or anything, at least until I can figure out the copyright issues.

Thanks.

Inverse Icarus · September 18, 2001, 12:11

hey Harlan, good show.

i'll be sure to keep it low key, and perhaps we will be working on some scenarios in the future...

jsw363 · September 18, 2001, 13:48

WOW! Harlan, what an impressive collection you've got going there. Brilliant job! I'm sure that it will be of invaluable use to the civ community.

I've only been to the Scenario League Forum, but any chance that someone over there has a place for your site. They're talking about renovating and reinvigorating the site when they see how scenario-friendly civ3 is.

If I ever make a scenario(very ambitious goal for me), I'll be sure to look there first.

PGM · September 18, 2001, 17:01

Great contribution, Harlan.

Maybe this time I won't find scenarios that take Portugal as a Spanish province.

Harlan · September 18, 2001, 23:52

Hi,
Thanks guys. Does anyone actually know what the common practice with copyrighted material on the web is?

More maps should be coming soon - I'm emptying out the rest of my map collection.

Roman · September 19, 2001, 02:25

Wow, Harlan - absolutely amazing!

Roman · September 19, 2001, 02:25

And not only for scenarios...

JosefGiven · September 19, 2001, 03:16

Nice one, Harlan

I've just bookmarked that fruit

Marquis de Sodaq · September 19, 2001, 11:12

If anybody can convert bitmaps or other images to Civ maps (ala Mercator's MapEdit program), I can help. As a professional geographer, the world is my desktop! If you need coastlines, elevation, vegetation, there is data available.

That said, I am at work. But if you are serious, and need input, PM me about what you need for your scenario.

Samples:

Harlan · September 19, 2001, 11:12

Roman,
Pray tell, what are these other uses? With your use of the leering emoticon, looks like you want to do something lewd with them!

Marquis,
That image you attached looks awesome. Why don't you do up one for the whole Old World, and I'll add it to my site! If you could keep the level of detail high, that would be great. Any other resources out there you'd have to add would be awesome also. DEMs (digital elevation models) and/or topographical maps of these areas would be great too, for people wanting to know where to put hills and mountains.

Marquis de Sodaq · September 19, 2001, 11:13

vegetation classes:

Harlan · September 19, 2001, 11:34

Marquis,
I'm having trouble downloading your vegetation classes image. Could you do something else with it so I can see it? Vegetation data is of course extremely key. Any chance you could get historical data too?

Henrik · September 19, 2001, 12:04

Harlan the map of European Country Populations around 1600, actually gives the "cities 1715" when I click at it...

JosefGiven · September 19, 2001, 12:09

Tell you what, dudes, an invaluable resource for historical maps is
The Times : History of the World isbn: 0 7230 0894 9

This is my favourite of all books, and contains glorious maps from all important eras of history. Fantastic.

Similarly, try this on for size:

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/map_s...ist_sites.html

BeBro · September 19, 2001, 14:09

Harlan, great work!

Marquis, the first pic you posted here looks like a computer generated map/landscape. If that is right can you recomment software for that purpose?

Cyclotron · September 19, 2001, 14:19

Very nice... you should talk to the Scenario League or something... looks like good material!

Harlan · September 19, 2001, 14:24

Hendrik,
Thanks, I'll fix that. If that's the only one, I'd be surprised, cos I threw the website together in one evening. I haven't actually tested anything out except in the most cursory way, so please let me know if you see anything else wrong. The main problems are likely to be thumbnails pointing to the wrong thing, and labels referring to different maps than what the thumbnail shows.

Josef,
That book sounds very interesting. Any chance you could scan some of those great maps in? (the ones that fit the mandate of the website: showing economy, terrain, trade, roads, culture, religion, etc.. and not political boundary maps) I tried looking the book up at Amazon, and got The Sunday Times History of the World Cup instead, as the nearest match I guess.

The ISBN number didn't help, but maybe I didn't get the spacing right or something.

JosefGiven · September 19, 2001, 15:01

Quote:

Originally posted by Harlan
Josef,
That book sounds very interesting. Any chance you could scan some of those great maps in? (the ones that fit the mandate of the website: showing economy, terrain, trade, roads, culture, religion, etc.. and not political boundary maps) I tried looking the book up at Amazon, and got The Sunday Times History of the World Cup instead, as the nearest match I guess.

The ISBN number didn't help, but maybe I didn't get the spacing right or something.

Hmm, I tried checking that ISBN number out on a few sites and got nothing back...confusing, since I had the very book in front of me...Odd, that. I did a swift search using a site called Bookbrain, which did track it down, and I think the 'official' name of the book, from a publisher's point of view is:

"Times" History of the World, The Ultimate Work of Historical Reference by Overy, RJ

The only problem is, it costs a princely £50, which is what, US$ 70-75?

Are there any specific periods from history or geographical regions you want scans from, mate? To be honest, I'm a bit nervous of splaying this beautiful book over my scanner, and having to wrench at it's spine to get it flush with the scanner's surface.

But then, if I can provide the cause with some decent material without wrecking the book, I'll do what I can.

BTW, what did you make of the stuff at the end of that link I put in my last post?

Josef

ranskaldan · September 19, 2001, 15:07

harlan... when i clicked on the 500bc europe languages link i got 375bc trade instead
the 500bc europe economy link is linked to 145bc trade
and the 350bc greece is linked to 825bc trade
there are two identical links to 145bc europe trade
the 500ad europe languages link is broken.
the 750ad world religions is linked to 500ad world religions instead.

as you can see i've been avidly clicking through every single map

great job harlan!
and one final question: is there a quick, painless way to download every single map off your site?

Harlan · September 19, 2001, 17:34

Raskaldan,
Thanks, keep em coming, and I'll fix them tonight. I don't know of a quick painless way to download lots of stuff, sorry.

Josef,
I would love some scans from the book. At least send one so I can see what the book is like. As far as what stuff to scan in particular, things that follow the criterion for the website (trade goods, roads etc as mentioned below), and are about years and/or places not already covered would be the best. I esp. like maps that show city sizes.

I was already familiar with the link you included. Most of it I wasn't impressed with. Seems to me there aren't that many good maps on the web, except the common political boundary types.

mactbone · September 19, 2001, 17:41

Ranskaldan:
Get FlashGet from ZDNet, install it. Now whenever you right click on a webpage, it'll give you the option "Download all with FlashGet". That should do the trick.

Harlan · September 19, 2001, 18:51

Mac,
I haven't used that program before, but are you sure it would work in this case? The point isn't to download all the images on the page, since they're just thumbnails, but to download all the images that would appear as popups if you clicked on the thumbnails. With that program actually do that? If so, that's really cool.

Harlan · September 19, 2001, 20:34

About 30 more maps are up just now, and the errors pointed out have been corrected. Thanks for noticing those.

Roman · September 20, 2001, 05:33

Quote:

Originally posted by Harlan
Roman,
Pray tell, what are these other uses? With your use of the leering emoticon, looks like you want to do something lewd with them!

No ulterior motive - I just love historical maps and sometimes just look at them for pleasure.

I have some historical atlases of my own, but unfortunately I don't have a scanner, so I cannot post the maps on your site.

TCO · September 20, 2001, 06:38

Quote:

Originally posted by Harlan
Hi,
I've been collecting maps for a long time. With Civ3 coming out soon, I've decided to make a lot of them available to help scenario makers out. Hopefully this will help make scenarios achieve a higher level of quality than in Civ2.

I've thrown them up onto a website, which you can check out at:
http://www.earthisland.org/borneo/other/index.html

However, there are several problems. The first is that the site is now on my work website, and can't stay there for long! Markos, I've emailed you several times about hosting it on Apolyton, but haven't heard back. If anyone else has hosting ideas, I'm all ears, and need something fast.

Second problem is that 99% of the images there are probably trampling copyright laws, so I'd appreciate it if you keep this website low key, and don't link to it or anything, at least until I can figure out the copyright issues.

Thanks.

Maybe Markos doesn't want to host stuff that is copyright violations.
Of course AnnC would say he does...

Locutus · September 20, 2001, 07:45

Wow! Amazing site Harlan, this would indeed be very useful for scenario makers of any civ-type game. One thing strikes me though: no maps of the Americas. Any particular reason?

As far as hosting goes, if all else fails you could sign up at Angelfire (or a similar provider). They don't have maximum limit for size or anything (not that I know of anyway) so you can put up as many maps as you want. I don't have first-hand experience with them but I heard a lot of good things about them.

JosefGiven · September 20, 2001, 10:58

Here's a demo image from The Times Histo Atlas.

It's a provincial-political map of Japan under the Shoguns.

The small red and orange arrows you can see coming into the provinces of Chichuzen and Nagato are the routes of Mongol invasions. (Red: 1274, Orange: 1281).

Shogun : Total War veterans will revel in glee that the provincial divisions relate almost exactly to the map in the game of the same name!

Harlan, I have a much, much bigger image of this map in full 16.7 million colours if you want it, but that's a whopping 11MB big. To be honest, the transition from 16.7m colours to 256 hasn't harmed the image at all, but the text certainly reads easier on the larger sized map.

Unfortunately, most maps in the Times Histo Atlas overlap the hinge, and the bigger ones don't even fit onto my tiny-a$s, came-with-the-computer scanner. If you like the one I've linked in above, I'll post a list of all the maps that I will be able to scan successfully.

All the best,

Josef

ranskaldan · September 20, 2001, 13:02

I've downloaded FlashGet, it works with a few other sites I tried but somehow it doesn't with Harlan's. I think that it works by following every single link on the page but Harlan's links are a bit weird. If i just move my mouse cursor over the thumbnails it looks as if all his thumbnails are linked to the same page.

anyway, thanks MacTBone, it's a really useful program though it didn't work out in this case.

dainbramaged13 · September 20, 2001, 13:30

Quote:

Originally posted by JosefGiven

Shogun : Total War veterans will revel in glee that the provincial divisions relate almost exactly to the map in the game of the same name!

YEP!! its perfect in fact! i was juist about to reply making a comment about shogun total war and recommending it to people when i saw your comment and hit 'reply with quote' instead

btw, it is a great game

Marquis de Sodaq · September 20, 2001, 19:11

BeBro, the visible graphic is indeed an elevation map. I have one already made for the whole world, and can snip out any particular extents. It is a JPEG (or did I save as TIFF?). I use a software at work that probably nobody, including me, has at home. However, it can be pared down to desired extents with any graphic software.

What is great about this world image is that it is in the same projection as the general world data I have at work - they overlay perfectly. The vegetation classes can be converted to CivII map format, the elevation used as a reference to add mountains and hills. The vegetation class zones data I have is modern, but ignores human "interaction". Basically, what would grow here if we weren't killing all the plants.

Harlan, f you have trouble opening the crescent.bmp with Imaging - getting a popup about a missing .dll - open MS Paint and open it as a file there. If you still have trouble, I can repost it.