Based on bizarcasm's Typus Orbis Terrarum and Camara's Umbra Spherae, I am developing a new map that extends further north to show the full beauty of North America. Although I have mostly stopped playing CK2, logging in to the game, listening to the music, and viewing the seasonal change in the game world is still my main way for relaxing after work, hence the initial goal of this mod is simply to create the most pleasant map to look at as possible.
I had made some modification to the height map, fixing water color and lake, adjust terrain and swap some textures in order to achieve the most natural look. As you may notice, the map is bright and have a CK2 feels but not as vivid and lust as Umbra Spherae.
The project has been going for a while at a really slow pace, mostly due to me learning as I am doing. Due to some technical difficulties, I had to shelf the project for a long time, to the point now I forget how I did some part of it in the first place. Luckily,I just got some breakthrough recently which sparks some hope for the completion of the project.
I decided to post about it now, since I believe the current state of the map looks good enough to be enjoyed at full view. However, there are still a lot of work to be done for the part that I did to meet Typus Orbis Terrarum quality. First, I am not completely satisfied with the current aspect ratio, but redone the projection mean a lot of works would need to be redone from scratch. Second, I am still undecided on how to render rivers as there is both upside and downside for each approach, so more experiment will need to be done. Third, making the northern coastline to look natural is a real challenge, as how the projection works creates a lot of straight lines and square edges, thus killing the immersion. I have try a few post processing techniques, but none has yielded a satisfying result yet.
For when it can be released, right now, I am running the mod on an old version of Umbra Spherae and have not tested the compatibly with the newest version yet. Regardless, the huge number of provinces in Umbra Spherae combining with the size of this map will make gameplay suffer a lot. So, nothing playable could be released anytime soon. Not only I need to finish with the graphics, a lot gameplay elements will also need to be tweak in order to make gameplay on this scale fun.
As it would be really hard for me to find time for modding in the up coming months, hopefully this post would serve as a bookmarks for my progress. Also, just in case my experiment breaks the mod to the point of unrecoverable, I still have a screenshot saving somewhere safe.
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