Re: Basic Scenario - Europe 1814
Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2016 6:40 pm
A couple of suggestions:
1. 1815 seems like a better date to me than 1814, since the latter is the actual year in which the Napoleonic Wars ended.
2. The geography and province borders in the original Imp1 map are quite inaccurate, and there would certainly be copyright issues with using it as a base. I think it would be better to use this equirectangular map from NASA as a base instead:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/173 ... ned%29.png
To keep the size of European countries roughly the same as they are in Imp1's scenarios, each tile would correspond to a 8x8 pixel square on that map. This would yield a 1024x512 map. With proper optimization, I think it should be possible to make it run with good performance, given that modern computers are much more powerful than those of the time when Imp1 was released. If you think that would be too unmanageable, however, another option is to have a 256x128 map based on a part of that world map:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/173 ... ope%29.png
Since water in the map is represented as transparency, an algorithm could check each 8x8 square on the map, and if it's more than 50% transparent, make it a water tile, and if not, make it a land tile. This would speed up the creation of the scenario by a lot. And then terrain features like deserts and mountains could be added in manually.
As for provinces, I have a list prepared already with many of them (i.e. Holstein, etc.), with which tiles they would encompass and so forth.
1. 1815 seems like a better date to me than 1814, since the latter is the actual year in which the Napoleonic Wars ended.
2. The geography and province borders in the original Imp1 map are quite inaccurate, and there would certainly be copyright issues with using it as a base. I think it would be better to use this equirectangular map from NASA as a base instead:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/173 ... ned%29.png
To keep the size of European countries roughly the same as they are in Imp1's scenarios, each tile would correspond to a 8x8 pixel square on that map. This would yield a 1024x512 map. With proper optimization, I think it should be possible to make it run with good performance, given that modern computers are much more powerful than those of the time when Imp1 was released. If you think that would be too unmanageable, however, another option is to have a 256x128 map based on a part of that world map:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/173 ... ope%29.png
Since water in the map is represented as transparency, an algorithm could check each 8x8 square on the map, and if it's more than 50% transparent, make it a water tile, and if not, make it a land tile. This would speed up the creation of the scenario by a lot. And then terrain features like deserts and mountains could be added in manually.
As for provinces, I have a list prepared already with many of them (i.e. Holstein, etc.), with which tiles they would encompass and so forth.