One of the main attractions of CK2 to me and to many others is the sandbox map painting element, which makes it quite frustrating when the wonky provinces won't allow you to draw that perfect border. Worse still, as I found after a lot of work into an abandoned project, it is near impossible to fix CK2's existing map by editing the provinces.bmp, because it doesn't use a map projection, and so several parts of the map are so distorted as to make tracing impossible.
This mod is a total, from scratch and by hand conversion of the CK2 map (or, more accurately, about 75% of it) to a new map using the Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area projection. The coastlines, topology, and many borders were created with GIS software and are pixel-accurate, while the rivers and most of the other borders were either traced from GIS files which I couldn't apply directly or traced from raster maps. I have focused my new province boundaries on allowing users to recreate borders between 1789 and 1946, but because this map has an actual projection, it is very simple to change the provinces to achieve whatever shapes you want.
Compatibility: is an interesting question. Strictly, the thing that makes this mod work is only in the map folder, but there is a lot of extra content in history and common, both because I had to remove the areas which are not on this map, and because the province setup is so messy in CK2 that I had to do a lot of extra work to make the landed titles make sense. In principle, this map should work for any mod which uses the default CK2 map, though you may have to do some tinkering to get it to play nice. If anyone is interested in using this map in their mods, they are free to do so with attribution.
Performance: This map is both smaller in pixel terms and in province counts than the vanilla map, so it should run better. I won't replace the areas I removed in any future version - I think especially areas like India and sub-Saharan Africa are tangential to CK2's theme and are a bit feature-bloaty.
At the moment, this is fully playable, but not quite 'finished'. Please report any bugs or issues. These are the areas where I know there is still work to be done:
- I need to find a higher-resolution satellite image for the colormap - the one currently included is a global Landsat image, which is fine but a little low-res. The problem I am running into is the area the map deals with overlaps areas which are typically separated in high-res imagery. If anyone can find a freely-available high-res global or Eurafroasia image to replace it, that would be great.
- Some of the lakes are unnecessary or interfere with the rivers. Please report if any of the lakes or any other aspect of the geography is manmade or otherwise period-inaccurate. I fixed the ones I knew about, but there were too many in my data to look up each one.
- The world_normal_height turned out 'blocky' despite my efforts to smooth out the topology - this is most visible in the Sahara, which looks like something out of Minecraft. I will keep experimenting, but please let me know if anyone knows why this happens/how to resolve it.
- I don't understand how the Silk Road or the invasion events work. Let me know if there are any problems with these and I'll try to fix them.
- Same with China - I don't own Jade Dragon, so all of those features probably are broken since I removed the China-adjacent areas. If anyone would like to upload a fix, I would gladly link it here.
Also, please let me know if there are any provinces out of geographical place or interesting borders which you would like included. This is really easy to fix.
Terrain map: https://i.imgur.com/fTUhXNv.png
1066 start: https://i.imgur.com/4mX9PrH.png
De jure kingdoms: https://i.imgur.com/vpp2OES.png
Example of what can be done with the new provinces: https://i.imgur.com/15Tm6QJ.png
Posted here for the sake of linking to direct download: https://www.mediafire.com/file/e3p19dfe2gzqk7j/RealMapProjection.rar/file
Steam workshop is here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1852463888
This mod is a total, from scratch and by hand conversion of the CK2 map (or, more accurately, about 75% of it) to a new map using the Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area projection. The coastlines, topology, and many borders were created with GIS software and are pixel-accurate, while the rivers and most of the other borders were either traced from GIS files which I couldn't apply directly or traced from raster maps. I have focused my new province boundaries on allowing users to recreate borders between 1789 and 1946, but because this map has an actual projection, it is very simple to change the provinces to achieve whatever shapes you want.
Compatibility: is an interesting question. Strictly, the thing that makes this mod work is only in the map folder, but there is a lot of extra content in history and common, both because I had to remove the areas which are not on this map, and because the province setup is so messy in CK2 that I had to do a lot of extra work to make the landed titles make sense. In principle, this map should work for any mod which uses the default CK2 map, though you may have to do some tinkering to get it to play nice. If anyone is interested in using this map in their mods, they are free to do so with attribution.
Performance: This map is both smaller in pixel terms and in province counts than the vanilla map, so it should run better. I won't replace the areas I removed in any future version - I think especially areas like India and sub-Saharan Africa are tangential to CK2's theme and are a bit feature-bloaty.
At the moment, this is fully playable, but not quite 'finished'. Please report any bugs or issues. These are the areas where I know there is still work to be done:
- I need to find a higher-resolution satellite image for the colormap - the one currently included is a global Landsat image, which is fine but a little low-res. The problem I am running into is the area the map deals with overlaps areas which are typically separated in high-res imagery. If anyone can find a freely-available high-res global or Eurafroasia image to replace it, that would be great.
- Some of the lakes are unnecessary or interfere with the rivers. Please report if any of the lakes or any other aspect of the geography is manmade or otherwise period-inaccurate. I fixed the ones I knew about, but there were too many in my data to look up each one.
- The world_normal_height turned out 'blocky' despite my efforts to smooth out the topology - this is most visible in the Sahara, which looks like something out of Minecraft. I will keep experimenting, but please let me know if anyone knows why this happens/how to resolve it.
- I don't understand how the Silk Road or the invasion events work. Let me know if there are any problems with these and I'll try to fix them.
- Same with China - I don't own Jade Dragon, so all of those features probably are broken since I removed the China-adjacent areas. If anyone would like to upload a fix, I would gladly link it here.
Also, please let me know if there are any provinces out of geographical place or interesting borders which you would like included. This is really easy to fix.
Terrain map: https://i.imgur.com/fTUhXNv.png
1066 start: https://i.imgur.com/4mX9PrH.png
De jure kingdoms: https://i.imgur.com/vpp2OES.png
Example of what can be done with the new provinces: https://i.imgur.com/15Tm6QJ.png
Posted here for the sake of linking to direct download: https://www.mediafire.com/file/e3p19dfe2gzqk7j/RealMapProjection.rar/file
Steam workshop is here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1852463888
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