Matrix Games Forums

I'm just curious, what might be the best procedure for map editing.

Do you edit the map only with GIMP or photoshop? Or only with AB mab editor? Or mix of them?

Do you fix the map section by section? (every 15 or 10km square) Or do you fix part by part? (road, railroad, forest, elements by elements for entire map)

I use shapefiles in GIS app, then Photoshop and edit in layers and masks. But I still havent found an easy and not so time consuming way to "pixelart" lines and features.

Thanks for your opinion, I'm also searching for the way to optimize 'pixelart' works. BTW, how do you use shape layers from GIS? QGIS can make some polygons and lines, but not sure how those help for this "pixelart" work.

I'd say it depends! I've found it useful to do "big features" and outlines in Gimp - it's much easier to get an overview of the whole map that way, overlay it with guides (like real maps), and copy/paste things. However, anything that requires detail is something I prefer doing in the in-game editor. Ultimately, since your map has to look good in-game, it makes sense to work on it in-application as much as possible.

So I'd say in my case, it's about an 80/20 split - I edit with the in-game map editing mode 80% of the time, and spend about 20% in the graphics editor (Gimp in my case). But that's not a written rule or anything!