Britain in Winter Shocker!

OK, it's been snowing over here for a week. I can look out my window I see this. I can be stuck on a train going nowhere and see this. I can be shunted onto a replacement bus service only for the bus to get stuck halfway up a hill and start sliding back down on the ice-covered roads. THis is ok, and makes a nice change to the normal commute into work. But the constant media coverage of it is driving me insane. Not just reporting that it's snowing, but finding umpteen inane realted storeies to analyse. Does me managing to get into work in a slow-clogged London really 'symbolise the great industrious spirit of our nation'? Nah.. especially not the fact that I later slunk off early, managed to get lucky on the trains, and spent the afternoon playing on the toolset...

Gotta say, I do like the overland map system. Been trawling through the scripts and peeling things apart, and its a nice way of handling things. A few slight queries - like why, whene everything else is handled with local variables, does the ginc_overland file define the number of terrain maps for random encounters there, as opposed to on the map area or something - but I like the way it handles the encounters, and the use of 2da's to store data is funky.

Below show my early attempts at making an overland map (bonus points for people guessing the region!). I first made a custom vfx of the region from the FR map, and then scaled it to fit the area I had, then traced out the main features - black roads, green forests, blue rivers etc. That really helped with scale, and getting the right relative distances. As Phoenixus mentions in his post (with some very nice screenies), because you are dealing with things on a shrunken scale, it makes terrain texture management a little more tricky. For example, the Anauroch desert suddenly found itself moved slightly to buy me an extra texture block in a neighbouring megatile.

One thing that has struck me, is a great resource for future overland maps would be to have one core encounter 2da + blueprints that contained all the encounters you might expect in an FR campaign, which builders could then trim as they see fit for their own use depending on their setting/region/terrain. Might have a go at that myself...