Yay! I've discovered a new way of doing the sector maps

[Rob Lang]

[randolph]

looking forwared to seeing how they come out!

[Rob Lang]

I am also going to add a load more detail onto them. I can do this now as I can select a font that is very small and it will still print ok. That's the joy of vector for you. I would recommend doing as much line art and the like in vector graphics because it scales so effortlessly! I'll try and get a preview by the end of the week, although it won't be much to look at!

[Kinslayer]

I wish I had been given this advice back in 2002 or so. I'm a bit invested in raster maps by now. Then again, some of my maps are patterned after older drawing styles, and these don't vectorise for crap.

[Rob Lang]

Kinslayer, I hear you about vectorising old style maps. Some do not lend to it at all well. If you're going to go with pixels then 300DPI+ is a must. I know this is a bit late in the day for this info but someone else might read this.

[Kinslayer]

Now that I'm thinking about it, my big world map includes lots and lots of fractal coastlines. Even vectorising the extant raster map on a global scale would produce some terribly large files. Still, the zooming capability is superior for vector maps. I'll give it a go and see how things look...

[misterecho]

sorry to sound like a total idiot, what is a vector map?

[Rob Lang]

There's no such thing as a stupid question!

In v3.5, the sectors maps (the maps of human occupied space) are all bitmaps - made up of pixels. That's ok but you want them to be sharp when printed, you have to make them high resolution - or more pixels. In fact, an A4 at 300DPI is a shed load of pixels and more. Furthermore, if you want to make edits to the map, it's a bit of a pain because you're playing with pixels.

Vector images are made up from shapes, so regardless of the resolution of the print, they always look sharp. Also, if I want to make changes, I can tweak the shapes and not have to worry about the pixels being all bent out of shape. ALSO, I can turn those shapes into code, which is nice if I want to do anything codey online in the future.

[misterecho]

Thanks for the clarification.

[Kinslayer]

For raster, think of printing an image found online, especially one that's been blown up to several times its size. It's just not going to look right.

For vector, think of images done in Flash. The edges are very sharp, but the images are flat and lacking texture.