Help with making maps...?

[Jeroak Nelave]

Does anyone have any tips on making believable maps. I just cant seem to get it right. I think i have figured out how the stretching tool works, but i cant figure out how the smooth tool works, it just seems to make vertical landmasses go down to 0 altitude.

Any good ideas on how to do a gradual slope too? i dont think i'll have too much problems with mountainous regions, seems like a piece of cake, but doing gradual slopes and generally level areas ( like plains), is pretty hard for me.

Tips?

[Rodak]

I am still working on this myself.

To teach myself how it works I have been modifying pre-made stuff rather than starting from scratch.

It helps make sense of things for me, so maybe it'll help you...

Good Luck with it.

Peace.

[Brutemein]

Some of the things I've done while making field maps:

1) Use the mound tool and lower the altitude slightly on any area where there's dirt terrain, which is what I'm using for roads. The reasoning being these roads are well-traveled and have a slight depression to them.

2) To make a field more interesting and make it feel "bigger," add in water running through the map and create different levels of terrain that the player has to navigate around and find other ways to climb up. This makes a huge difference; a flat field that your player can run across in a few minutes will take twice as long and be more interesting mentally if he encounters cliffs, valleys, plateaus, etc.

It's a shame setting terrain to ocean immediately drops its altitude to 0, and there are no bridge objects, but you could set some up land running across the water to form a natural bridge, or my favorite, making cliffs around the water so it you can stand high above it and admire it.

Ooh! To make shorelines look random with juts of rock and such, go around a shoreline with the bump and slope tools, just a little bit at a time, raising and lowering the altitude. I have a couple beaches in my maps where you can see the land underneath the water, and it juts out of the water irregularly in places. It's pretty neat-looking.

My favorite maps I've made so far are ones where I just messed around and didn't go in with specific features in mind. Run over your land with all of the tools, and don't be afraid to use more than one tool in one spot. Combinations of tools can make some pretty nifty terrain. Actually, the hardest bits I've had in mapmaking were places where I wanted the land to be just so...it's hard to be really precise in this. But then again, nature isn't precise, either...

[NikisKnight]

A few things that helped me-
1. Start shows both terrian and elevation, use it to make sure your roads don't go on top of mountains.
2. Use L1 & R1 when making elevation to make a bigger/smaller tool.
3. Place mountains or ocean or rives around the edge, so the player will know where/why they can't move further.
4. Smooth the areas around shorelines if you don't want all water to have cliffs around.
5. The water level starts at 40, I think, maybe 50.