Wow, seriously?! Okay!

@theo thank you for the kind words! If you want to print this map irl - better write to me in Discord, I will give you a full-size version with four times more detail. It is 16385px, and the texture in the mod is only 8192px.

Hiii! Just to let you know, I uploaded this to my cloud storage and devices for personal use. And hopefully one day I will print this. Great map!

@normad Don't worry, as I said earlier, I took into account all your wishes, gentlemen, and soon there will be a release of the interactive version, because of the lack of free time I am somewhat stuck on endless polishing

I second what @Shnaizeris has said, I do like the look of this map with the sole exception of the zone borders being a faded white. Something that stands out more would be fantastic.

The boundaries of the zones are almost invisible, perhaps it would be possible to make a version with black or dark boundaries instead of white ones?

Wow, that sounds complicated as heck. I appreciate the explanation...

Btw, speaking of Paint•NET - yes, I used it for DDS too - but abandoned it when working on my other blood traces mod .
It's much more familiar to work on the "TIFF/PNG→DDS" stage in it than in GIMP - but it generated all those damned mipmaps poorly, and for them I had to go to GIMP - imho the problem with Paint•NET is its imperfect DXT5 compression mechanism (the Krita plugin you mentioned earlier had a similar problem before btw)

@Mechanos yes, about Krita (aka "GIMP's beautiful sister") —
I also banged my head, but - alas - the plugin can only ITSELF generate mipmaps - which I need custom.
These are precisely the zoom layers, which in v.2 should have different detail and notations - and the first layer (mip0 - the strongest zoom) - should not have any redundant information at all, except for the exact relief, scale close to native.
And at the moment I am experiencing a real pain in the ass from the mipmap shifts generated by the insertion tool when using the Ps plugin from Nvidia.
Sorry for longread. xD

Have you tried paint.net btw? Supposedly it comes with DDS support out of the box, and many people like it better than gimp (for DDS specifically). I liked paint.net as a general editor (especially for quick edits), but have 0 experience with DDS. *takes another big drink of steel reserve*

Oh cool, thanks!

I've been using GIMP lately for .dds but yeah it's not great...

@Nemon - Great to hear! More than happy to try it out once you got something. I hope you get your 3 days lol.

Regarding DDS, I'm currently drunk and stupid and rocking out to spotify and cleaning chinchilla cages for chinchillas that aren't even mine. So it may be wise to ignore everything I say after this point. I briefly looked into DDS editors (and then cross referenced with Krita, as that's the graphic tool I'm currently using the most) and I found this DDS exporter plugin https://krita-artists.org/t/python-plugin-dds-support-windows-only/73488 but.. you know what, after typing that out, I feel like that's probably not the deep editing you're after 🤣. But I wish you luck, and your efforts are appreciated.

@RatboyW @Mechanos @Hari Seldon @maihasegawa

Ladies and gentlemen! Your comments will be taken into account when I release v.2 — as soon as my damn real job gives me a break after two months of crunch for at least 3 days in a row ahaha

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By the way, I would still appreciate a suggestion for a more convenient alternative to the "Photoshop+NVidia TexTools Plugin" bundle for deep editing of DDS textures, because I find the current solution a bit "cumbersome" and a bit buggy.
Maybe someone of you knows a good graphics tool with a better implementation of independent access to DDS texture mipmap layers? GIMP3.0, alas, still hasn't eliminated the limitation of full mipmap regeneration on export, alas.

I also very much like this map, but it would be nice to have zone labels too...

I agree with other comments.
Add zone labels and this'll become the best map for sure.

+1 for zone labels! I absolutely love the amount of detail and accuracy in this mod. But I'm currently stuck trying to decide between "In-Game Biome Map", "Political Map Redux", "Islands Inkarnate Map Regions", or "Satellite map", due to their labeling. And with my bad memory, I really do make use of labels, and any other additional map information.

The first 3 in particular, have pretty nice labeling. But when zoomed in, there's no comparison. It gets pretty blurry, and makes me question their accuracy. Meanwhile, Satellite map is more detail oriented while still having zone labels, and even some color coding. But gives off a drawn topographical map feeling, that's kinda hard to get used to.

If this mod had zone labels (and optionally any other popular features the other maps have), it'd be pretty hard to beat! I'd be using this for sure - and I may anyway, just to see how long I can go without labels/color coding.

That would probably be the best course of action, but I would only remove them on the last couple zoom steps, maybe even just the last. Idk how many mipmaps are generated for the world map, but I foresee an issue with legibility if the name is removed too early in that chain

If it works, that's a pretty interesting Idea, I'd have to see how it looks before I could tell you if I liked it, but it sounds like a good idea to me

Thanks for the feedback! I always appreciate an extra thumb in my thumb collection.

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BTW! I haven't asked people outside of our Discord about this before, but do you think it's a good idea to put zone names literally in the center of each one - but make them only visible at high zoom?
I noticed that the map interface in Kenshi uses dds mipmaps , and I was thinking about experimenting with putting zone names EXACTLY IN THE MIPMAP LAYERS , this should /theoreticaly/ hide them when you zoom in, and reveal them when you zoom out.

How do you like that, @Wyr ?

Thanks, having zone names would make things much better; I really like how accurate this map is, but without zone names it's a bit hard to use when trying to go to specific places

@RatboyW That's exactly what I'm going to do, I'm thinking about inscribing them in a topographical style - but either a thin or translucent style, with light shadows.
I'm currently making a list of all the names I'll need, + those that are purely lore-related, like "Heng's Tail" zone, i think...

I actually tried to solve it for you by pulling the zones/zone names from Nice Map (with permission ofc), but I couldn't find any separate files for it :/

Could maybe just pull inspiration from Nice Map, pick a fitting font and do smth similar? The zone names are pretty unobtrusive there

@RatboyW @Wyr Well, I avoided creating zone labels for two reasons - I didn't want to create a clutter, and (mostly) - because I'm not an artist, and I didn't want to make ugly ones as "at least some". Well, if the public asks for it - I can update the map, adding zone labels to it. But I will really hope that I won't break someone else's game experience with my update)

This would be the undeniably best map mod if the zones had names

It'd be quite nice if the zones were labelled, I must admit I don't know all of them simply by appearance, I had hoped this map had them