Developer Diary 8

This developer diary was first posted in the M&T forum here, and team members answered some questions in the thread. It was further posted on the M&T subreddit here, and team members also commented there.

Dev Diary #8 - Cartography (part 1)
I’m cutting it a bit short… I know some places are already in 2020, but I still have six hours to go…

Without further ado, for this last dev diary of 2019, I’ll present some of the work done on the map for 3.0.

A couple of things still need to be fleshed out, but we are getting there for the regions of the map I’m presently showcasing.

NB: Click on the images for larger sizes.

NB2: the screenshots have been made using the TOT submod that is not included in base M&T (and will not be).

First area is Europe. The largest work, done in no small part by @Aldaron, is the reprojection. Following our latest projection change, the shape of the provinces was off-target.





With this done, we could make some small changes. The main and most anticipated one was the simplification of Saxony-Thuringia, removing some of the tiny provinces to be recycled elsewhere. Our goal (nearly achieved, I’ll be honest) was province count neutrality in Europe and avoiding a too large addition outside Europe.

This allowed us to split a couple of large German provinces like Magdeburg, Würzburg and Pfalz.



As we had still some extra slots with the Saxony rework and the reprojection gave us some fairly big provinces, we split down Argonne and Auvergne.



With the reprojection, the mountain ranges were cleaned up a bit, and the large Piedmont province was split to add Cunéo.



Likewise, the reprojection of the southern Balkans and Greece allowed us to carve out a couple provinces like Rhodopes in southern Bulgaria.



That is about it for now for Europe province changes.

Thanks to a lot of help from @FireKahuna, China and the neighbouring regions were reprojected as well.





Following some feedback from the Cartographer’s Office, Tibet and its surroundings were corrected.



China also gained a couple provinces. Looking closely, you’ll notice that the Grand Canal is now physically represented on the map as a river.





Korea has been more or less totally reworked. Like before, it’s based on the eight traditional provinces. For further splits, I used three factors:


 * the short-lived 1895 split
 * the 1896 thirteen province split
 * the terrain and historical population density

We agree that 1895 and 1896 are after the mod’s timeframe, but it allows us to avoid too much randomness.



Last but not least for this dev diary is a face-lift for eastern Persia, including the fixing of Zahedan and Zaranj. The wastelands were reworked based on population density data. This includes the addition of the Registan desert.





''We've also had a chance to review the heightmap in-use, and have completely regenerated the heightmap from the ground up. We've used a high quality, lossless NASA based source, likely similar if not the same as the prior one, and maintained that quality through the process. The new heightmap includes more height range, and more data and detail within that range, showing more unique peaks and elevation than the prior heightmap.''

''Most importantly, we've used a different and less intensive technique to smooth the coastlines, restoring a lot of height detail and data in areas with mountainous shores and rugged elevation closeby. The result is smooth coastlines without losing detail, allowing certain regions to enjoy more of their real-world geography while mapping better to the geography-aware province borders.''