File talk:OB-map-Cyrodiil roadmap.png

How about color-coding the major roads by name? "Green Road", "Orange Road", etc. Pick an unused color for the minor roads, maybe white or grey? --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 09:14, 13 May 2007 (EDT)

Good ideas; I should be able to change that later today. The main thing I'm unsure about is how many locations to include. There are already gazillions of maps showing all locations, so I was thinking at first of only including settlements; but then I realised that Ayleid ruins are extremely useful landmarks. Currently I'm thinking: all houses, villages, and inns; Daedric shrines (hey, people live there too); and Ayleid ruins, at a minimum. Campsites? maybe. Forts? probably. I'm not really planning on including mines or caves. Definitely not Oblivion gates (life is too short).

I may be making a mountain out of a molehill -- there aren't actually that many minor roads to mark. But heck, the most time-consuming thing about this project was getting the coast outline done, so after that everything is pretty trivial :-)

Other changes to do: use slightly bigger icons; double-check terrain types in southern Cyrodiil; use colours to distinguish Nibenay Basin from Heartlands (the terrain types are different after all, whoops!); add colour for autumnal forest NE of Chorrol; add lots of icons; downgrade "Lord *'s Estate" locations to "house" icons. Petrushka 18:42, 13 May 2007 (EDT)

Alpha 3 posted. Updated TODO: add icons for Ayleid ruins and forts; crosscheck minor roads against Oblivion:Unmarked_Roads and the Online Map. Petrushka 04:52, 14 May 2007 (EDT)

Beta 1 posted. Previous TODO items now done. Icons added for camps. Still missing: icons for caves, mines, wayshrines. I don't anticipate feeling much need to add these, however. Petrushka 20:03, 8 September 2007 (EDT)

Full-size map?

Just for the record, this is shrunk down to about 58% of the original size to get it under the 150 kB barrier. The full-size version is 2959x2445. I can upload that too if anyone thinks it worthwhile; it's 576 kB as a (crushed) png, 224 kB if I index it to 256 colours. (The Paint.NET source file, which has layers galore and a hi-res terrain map, is WAAAYYYYY too big to upload -- ca. 30 MB.) Petrushka 20:35, 8 September 2007 (EDT)

Have you tried it as a .GIF file instead? GIFs are MUCH more economical in terms of file-size for images like this with less than 256 colors. PNGs are mostly used for small icon-like images, or where there's a need for full alpha masking. (GIFs have 0/1 transparency, but not true alpha.) Also, PNGs are only marginally supported in some browsers, most notably IE6, which is still the most commonly used browser out there. Not really a problem for this image, since the main feature not supported is the alpha, which this image doesn't have, but still there's little reason to use the PNG format here, and you can probably get a much larger image within the size limit by using GIF. (Incidentally, the 150KB thing is more of a guideline than an actual rule. We do have several images larger than that on the site, and for something like a full world map, a large image is to be expected anyhow.) --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 23:38, 8 September 2007 (EDT)

I have invariably got better filesizes with PNG than with GIF since I started using pngcrush! I've just tried it out, and the GIF is indeed bigger (at least when created by the GIMP or Paint.NET) -- 258 kB, as compared with 224 for a 256-colour PNG. I've shaved off another 50 kB by taking it down to 6-bit. I can't take it down any further -- at 5-bit depth the map icons start looking as though they've been through the wash too many times.

Indeed there's no alpha so shouldn't be any compatibility issues. But yes, I'll upload the full-size version in place of the 1725x1425 version. Cheers, Petrushka 02:14, 9 September 2007 (EDT)