| Developer Diary #2 - The Map | 2010-12-26 |
Making the map for a strategy game that covers the entire globe is not an easy task. One of the main reasons is that you know the geography of your country very well, but you don’t know world geography with the same amount of detail. If you ask people to draw a map of their country from memory, they will do a decent job. If you ask for their continent, it will be passable; if you ask for the world, the mistakes will be glaring. You can very easily tell where someone comes from just by looking at how they draw a map of the world.
Here is a map drawn from memory by me. Can you guess where I am from?
(Answer: South America)
So, how would you like to play Magna Mundi in this world? Would you, as a European, be happy looking at my version of Europe for most of your gaming time? What about if you come from East Asia? Would you, as a Japanese citizen, enjoy playing in my banana-like version of Japan? As you may have noticed, this is a flaw present in most global strategy games: detail degrades the further away you go from the mapmaker’s place of origin.
To avoid this, we have used the best tools that a mapmaker has today: math and data. To that end, we have combined six different databases:
• Shorelines
• Hydrography
• Topography
• Land Coverage
• Potential Vegetation
• Color
We then used a Braun stereographic projection (a compromise between distortions in area, distance, shape, and direction) to put everything together so that you can have the best map ever.
The effect of shoreline, topology, hydrography, and color on the quality of a map is evident and easily recognizable, but this is not the only thing that makes the Magna Mundi map come alive: terrain and vegetation are also very realistic, which we achieved by combining topographic data with land coverage and potential vegetation using a regressive algorithm that turns the vegetation and orography to how they were five centuries ago. In essence, the world is divided into dry, tropical, temperate, and boreal regions. Each region has at least three types of terrain (with the addition of mountains and wetlands), all beautifully hand-drawn by our artists.
The whole world is so full of detail that it’s hard to decide which parts to tease you with. I hope you like this small set.
Scandinavia is definitely one of the best parts of the world to use to show you the quality of our coastlines. In this screenshot you’ll see two types of boreal forests (deciduous and needle-leaf evergreen), two types of temperate forests (deciduous and needle-leaf evergreen), as well as temperate grasslands.
Iberia and Northeast Africa are nice spots for you to see the three types of dryland (desert, open, and dense shrubland), as well as a temperate forest (broad-leaf deciduous) that is almost exclusive to the Mediterranean.
The south of the US and northeast of Mexico is another nice spot that goes from drylands to temperate savannah, then grasslands, and then to temperate forests. The Everglades in Florida is one of the wetlands in the game. 
Now comes one that you will probably not recognize right away: western Sub-Saharan Africa. This is proof that we really applied the same amount of detail to the entire world. Here you can see how land goes from the desert to steppe, then to tropical savannah, then tropical dry forest, and finally to tropical rainforest along the coastline. 
Okay guys, that is it for now. I could post a hundred images showing you the entire world, but then I would rob you of the joy of discovering it yourself. I hope you enjoyed this small preview.
Stay tuned,
Andrés Munoz Jaramillo
