Displaying Custom Maps in-game: Tutorial and Japan/Korea Screenshot

[Eric.B]

 - Does anyone visit the forum?  It seems very quiet. 

Not so much anymore. The Steam forums killed most activity here. That's why I closed the forums in 2018/2019-ish. I only reopened it for the FBS, but it has underperformed, and some contributors haven't even made accounts yet.

I'm hoping for an uptick in activity once we hit the first milestone. Hopefully, the paywall attracts more users here. That said, the chat (discord/IRC) sees a little more activity. At one point, it was pretty much dead too.

That said, your Japanese map did gain a few tweets from our Japanese twitter community. GOG users also only have access to maps/mods on the forums. Sadly there aren't too many of them, but they exist.

Does anyone who does visit have interest in building maps, if the instructions were sufficiently easy to follow?  To me, GearCity seems like a natural fit for having multiple maps with different levels of granularity,

I've seen a few people making maps over the years, adding and removing cities. But none have taken it as far as you have with changing the map texture as far as I know.

but it's admittedly been a bit difficult to figure out how to create a new one from scratch.

I had planned on making a better video tutorial for the mod tools, including making a map from scratch. But the manual is taking longer than expected, especially now that I only touch GearCity Documentation on Mondays.

I suspect part of it is also simply the hazards of a flat map of a spherical world
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 - I noticed that the coordinates are top-left, bottom-right, etc. lat/long, rather than just left/right/top/bottom.  Is the game sophisticated enough that I could put in a "diagonal" rectangle rather than a "traditional" one and it would work?

No. The maps need to be in WGS84 or equirectangular projection for the coordinates to work. Both standards are rectangular, so the map will have to be rectangular, thus why we need only 2 coordinates. From the looks of it, you're using NASA's blue marble maps, which should be the correct projection. So with your cities being slightly off, your map coordinates are off. I suggest finding exact reference points you can naturally see to clip your map atm else than trial and error until the cities align.

E.g. could I do a map that goes southeast/northwest along the length of Italy, and put in those corner coordinates, and it would still put cities in the right place?  I don't have a good way of generating those maps yet but it's sort of cool if it works.

Out of the box, no. But, so long as the map is a rectangle, you can put the map in the game. Then you manually convert city coordinates for the map rotation. For instance, you could set your Italian map corners as 0,0, and 1,1. In real life, it would be 46,13, and 35,7. If you're rotating it 90-degrees it would become 13,46 and 7,35. Rome at 41,12 would become 12,41. Which then converted between a range of 0 to 1 would be 0.164, 0.545. That should put Rome on the map where it should be. However, this would screw up shipping, so you will need to tweak the numbers somewhat so they're closer to the real values.

Alternatively, the game does support 3d modeled maps. If you have those talents, you can do any type of map you want. Classic Map and both Territory maps are 3d modeled maps. The exported entry names for the city markers have to be the number corresponding to the city's ID. That and the lack of camera or model rotation is the only restrictions.


By the way, if you attach images to the post, and then inline them here on the post, they should appear inline now.