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JoeyB2198

Second Lieutenant
37 Badges
Jul 20, 2012
172
5
  • Crusader Kings II
  • Europa Universalis IV: Res Publica
  • Europa Universalis IV: Wealth of Nations
  • Europa Universalis IV: Conquest of Paradise
  • Crusader Kings II: Horse Lords
  • Europa Universalis IV: Common Sense
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  • Crusader Kings II: Way of Life
  • Europa Universalis IV: El Dorado
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  • Victoria 2
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  • Hearts of Iron IV: Cadet
  • Europa Universalis IV
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  • Stellaris: Leviathans Story Pack
  • Hearts of Iron IV: Together for Victory
  • Crusader Kings II: Monks and Mystics
  • Age of Wonders III
  • Crusader Kings II: Jade Dragon
  • Crusader Kings II: Holy Fury
  • Imperator: Rome
  • Stellaris - Path to Destruction bundle
  • Victoria 2: Heart of Darkness
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  • Europa Universalis IV: Art of War
  • Darkest Hour
  • Crusader Kings II: Sword of Islam
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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.

fTUhXNv.png


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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Oh, nice!
An actual map projection? :eek:
This really looks rather cool; good luck with it!

And also: Finally, someone else using actual GIS! I am working on something similar yet different atm (using QGIS 3), though I'm nowhere near your level of completion.
I'll probably PM you in the next few days, because I am sort of a newbie to GIS, and perhaps we can exchange some experiences/ideas :)
 
Amazing! Which method did you use for drawing the province borders?
 
I'm a GIS user and this is fantastic! Thank you
More GIS users still? Seems like this is not as rare as I thought ^^

This looks great.
I see your post has gotten 4 "disagrees", would those users like to explain themselves?
Well, anyone can respectfully disagree if they want.
But I must admit I am a bit puzzled by this as well. Surely this mod was a lot of work; and if there is something wrong with it, it would be better to also tell the author. And if one simply does not like the new map, there's no need to disagree, one can just use other mods.

Interesting, so this here isn't the first experiment into map projections it seems that has come to fruition?
The other map is for use with HIP though. They have always had fancier maps over at HIP, so I am not too surprised.
Still, this Gaea mod seems to use a different projection, an equirectangular one I think. Which preserves the direction of north as being "up", as opposed to this map here that preserves the area size.
It's a nice alternative anyway, for people who use vanilla.
 
Amazing! Which method did you use for drawing the province borders?

I overlaid a whole bunch of borders I could find GIS files for to get the large-level stuff, then did the rest by hand, tracing from maps.


I hadn't seen that, but definitely a cool project. That map definitely is closer to just moving vanilla CK2 onto a projected system, while mine is focused on optimizing gameplay in Europe, both in terms of land area and performance. I'm glad both exist, though - I'll have to try that one if I ever play India again.
 
I overlaid a whole bunch of borders I could find GIS files for to get the large-level stuff, then did the rest by hand, tracing from maps.

Thanks for the explanation, that sounds pretty cool! Your map of Imperial Austria is one of the most accurate I've ever seen in a Paradox game.
 
With trees and these corrections on dark terrain, it will be very good, as much as it does not add provinces, it does not look anything like vanilla, I support the idea that does not add, so there are no conflicts with mods like HIP, there is another mod also changing the map and not adding provinces, it's called Talvos' Map> https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/map-mod-talvos-map-mod.923850/
Uh, nice! I had completely missed that one as well. Never knew so many projected maps existed... wow.
Still, they all have somewhat different scopes, and thus I believe can nicely exist alongside each other. That Talvos one, for example, includes India, so it is an option for those that don't want to miss playing there. This one here, on the other hand, is more centered on the "traditional" Crusader Kings map and for those that prefer a slight performance boost to more playable regions.
 
I'm also using GIS for an overhaul project. Quite a bit of a leaning curve :eek: But very rewarding in the end, even if more jagged coastlines turn really pixelly and ugly in CKII. Lot of work to correct by hand.

And ones pertaining to 1850:
I don't know what program you're using, but with QGIS you can just import and plain old raster image and if you have some clue about the projection used and a couple coordinates of places on the map, the program will stretch and overlay it perfectly.
 
Are you planning some uptades? maybe a better painting or trees
 
I don't know what program you're using, but with QGIS you can just import and plain old raster image and if you have some clue about the projection used and a couple coordinates of places on the map, the program will stretch and overlay it perfectly.

Sure, but you still have to create the feature manually. It is a much faster process if someone has already created e.g. a GeoJSON with the GIS feature in question.