I'm not entirely sure if I posted this in the right subforum. If the moderators think this should belong somewhere else, my excuses for posting it at the wrong spot.
Ok, what's the deal? I wanted to make some nice maps for my AAR. Thanks to Fyrom I saw some good tutorials in which this mapmaking proces is explained. The only thing needed, was a blank map with all the provinces from In Nomine. Only... I couldn't find a high dimension blank worldmap over here. So I decided to make one myself, and share it with you all.
WARNING
The map got quite large, and with that I mean really large. The BMP has a resolution of 13104x5040 and is 188 MB. I originally made it in two flavours: one total blank map, and one with the water filled with blue and the permanent undiscovered terrain light gray. Recently I added a third flavour, by request: a blank map with no province borders, just the outlines of the continents. These are not included in the normal packages: they are separately available.
It has come to my attention that some prefer a .gif above a .bmp, so from every .bmp-map I made available here, I also made a .gif-version. Although the .bmp remains more popular, still a lot of people liked the .gif.
It has come to my ears that some people couldn't actually work with the enormous .bmp. Yes, I know, it is very large and big. Maybe too big for some computers. So therefor I made the map available in several sizes. I hope there is one you can work with!
To serve your needs, I have made several mappacks. You'll find them here:
URL: packed size - Unpacked size - What does this package contain?
EU3maps_BMPsuperpack.rar: 10.06 MB - 1.06 GB - This is it, the ultimate BMP package. You will get all sizes, both filled and empty. Only BMP.
EU3maps_GIFsuperpack.rar: 10.95 - 11.1 MB - This is it, the ultimate GIF package. You will get all sizes, both filled and empty. Only GIF.
EU3maps_BMP1024pack.rar: 2.16 MB - 46.1 MB - This package contains all the maps with a width of 1024 pixels, both filled and empty, only as BMP.
EU3maps_GIF1024pack.rar: 2.31 MB - 1.81 MB - This package contains all the maps with a width of 1024 pixels, both filled and empty, only as GIF.
EU3maps_worldmap.rar: 10.98 MB - 504 MB - This package contains the entire worldmap, both filled and empty, and in both BMP and GIF. For your convenience, it contains maps with the following resolutions: 1024x394, 3276x1260, 6552x2520 and of course the big one, 13104x5040.
EU3maps_africa.rar: 1.14 MB - 71.8 MB - The continent of Africa, both filled and empty, in sizes 3481x3297 and 1024x970, and in both BMP and GIF.
EU3maps_america.rar: 1.45 MB - 146 MB - Both North and South America, both filled and empty, in sizes 4525x5040 and 1024x1070, and in both BMP and GIF.
EU3maps_asia.rar: 2.77 MB - 119 MB - The continent of Asia, both filled and empty, in sizes 5377x3689 and 1024x703, and in both BMP and GIF.
EU3maps_australia.rar: 689 KB - 51.8 MB - Australia and Indonesia, both filled and empty, in sizes 3048x2656 and 1024x892, and in both BMP and GIF.
EU3maps_europa.rar: 1.29 MB - 45.9 MB - The continent of Europa, both filled and empty, in sizes 2817x2489 and 1024x905, and in both BMP and GIF.
EU3maps_middle-east.rar: 958 KB - 30.6 MB - The Middle East, both filled and ampty, in sizes 2105x2033 and 1024x989, and in both BMP and GIF.
EU3maps_north-america.rar: 1.03 MB - 83.3 MB - The continent of North America, both filled and empty, in sizes 4841x2865 and 1024x606, and in both BMP and GIF.
EU3maps_south-america.rar: 765 KB - 47.9 MB - The continent of South America, both filled and empty, in sizes 2305x3016 and 1024x1340, and in both BMP and GIF.
EU3maps_noprovinces_BMP.rar: 2.10 MB - 545 MB - All maps without provinces borders in BMP.
EU3maps_noprovinces_GIF.rar: 1.38 MB - 1.41 MB - All maps without provinces borders in GIF.
If you want a full overview of the mappacks you can download from my filefront account, you can look here.
To illustrate how they look like, I give you here examples from Europe in a resolution of 1024x905.
The European map, blank.
The European map, filled: the water is blue and the unexplored territories are grey.
The European map, with no provinces: I kept the lakes and inner seas, but they are easy to remove if you don't want them.
I saw four good tutorials for making nice maps.
- The first one is from thrashing mad. You can find his tutorial here.
- The second one is from Snugglie. You can find his tutorial here.
- The third one is from ComradeOm. You can find his tutorial here.
- The fourth one is from tuore. You can find his tutorial here.
Some examples of how people made use of these maps:
- Empires At Arms 1399-1960: Princes of the Renaissance, a massive multiplayer AAR. PetitBourgeois has made some maps, see here and here
- A Greater Netherlands - IN Brabant AAR, in which FYROM switches from using the vicky map to this one. See examples here and here.
- Islamic Spain - IN Granada AAR, my own AAR. See examples here.
- Paris isn't worth a mass! The Rise of a Huguenot France, by Milites. See examples here and here.
If you know an AAR that has some good examples from how you can make use of the maps, feel free to post it here and I'll add it to this post.
I hope this is usefull for you all.
EDIT:
The past year I received quite a few times a question about how I made these maps. Let me explain:
1. I took the gamefile 'provinces.bmp', which can be found in the map ~\Europa Universalis III\map\, and made a copy to another location.
2. I rotated it 180 degrees and mirrored it, so it had a normal orientation.
3. I enlarged it to the insane size you can download here. Normally the map is 1872x720 pixels, but I wanted a bigger one. Since it's a bitmap, the size also increased enormously.
4. I opened the increased map in Paint and started to draw small edges at the borders of each province. After I had given a province a border, I coloured it white. This process took me three days. Indeed, it's all handwork: no special program was used.
5. When I was finished with the enormous worldmap, I selected certain area's (for example, Europe) and saved those as separate files. That's how I created the more detailled maps: they are just parts of the enormous big worldmap. And of course, the different sizes are all smaller versions of the large worldmap.
If you want to add or change a province according to a mod or a newer version, I suggest you do the following:
1. Open the extremely large worldmap in a graphical program that can handle layers (for example, Gimp, Photoshop or Paintshop Pro).
2. Open the 'provinces.bmp' from the mod or newer version of EU3 in a different layer, and rescale it to fit the enormous size.
3. Make the top layer transparent, so you can see both the blank worldmap as the provinces.bmp.
4. Redraw the changed provinces.
5. Save the new blank worldmap with a different name. For detailled maps, you can select the area of your choosing.
If you created a new map and wish to share it, you can post the link here, or send me a pm: I'll add your maps to this post, and will give you of course credit.
If you don't have the space to host you new maps, you can pm me: I can put it with the other maps on my filefront account.
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. I now have made an extra rarfile with the same files saved as GIF-files. You can choose if you want the bitmaps of the gifs.
. At my computer it all works fine, I can even have EU3 running at the same time while working with that map. But in my AAR asd had hinted me that it could be too large to handle, so I finally made some lower resolutions available 
Originally Posted by Monnikje
Written as an article for the AARlander.
Do you happen to have all blank world maps with only the borders for the continents (eg no province-borders).
