Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Rivellon Map Project

In one of the latest Kickstarter videos there are many maps.

So we now have a snapshot of a bit of the D:OS II map, which at least shows Fort Joy in relation to what I presume to be the usual landmass.

Wait a Minute. Is this Picture "official" or is this made by you?
If it is made buy you - amazing work. If this is Offical. DAFUQ how big will Act2/3 be...

No, that was just me pressing the print screen button. My understanding is that Act I is about 20-25% of the game.

And RenWex may be able to create a map like that, but my graphical skills are rather indifferent! I extended a map for Oblivion ages back but it was a bit meh.

Oh okay. I mean i didn't beat the first Act yet, so i suppose you will see this Map once you get your Ship. Amazing - the Art of the Map is awesome and the World seems pretty big to me!

I think Mapmakers will be pretty popular in DOS2 due GM Mode and the Importfeature =D

Cool map. Looks like we get to sail from Buccaneer's Den to Verity Isle!

Well now we have a new map to add (if only we could figure out which direction is north! ) that could make things interesting. I'm guessing that the island with Fort Joy probably needs to move a bit to the east and that Reaper's Coast is probably the main landmass to the east of Cyseal... though its exact orientation is a bit vague.

Perhaps time to resurrect this topic after I monumentally screwed up with Renwex's final(?) version of the map from way back, having forgotten it was created before the remainder of the game after Fort Joy was released and mistakenly labelled Hunter's Edge as Driftwood. Bugger.



So I've been thinking about trying to do it properly, even though I have no 1337 skillz in this area at all. What I have done is to attempt to superimpose the in-game map (swiped from one of the guides... erk) over the artistic map and finding that... well, they're kinda alike but also not. I knew the art map was rotated by about 75⁰ but it seems that the scaling is also random, not least the distance from Fort Joy to Driftwood, but the rest while it kinda sorta fits, doesn't do so especially well.

Though I suppose I view the ingame terrain as definitive maybe I shouldn't be too picky with the compass as Original Sin's was at a jaunty 45⁰ angle and I seem to recall some weirdness with Divinity II (as in Ego Draconis) too.



But it gives a rough outline of the landmass and the likely relative position of things. Does that fit with the above map? Dunno. Can it be made to fit? Well anything can with a big enough hammer.

If I do attempt it, I'm inclined to leave Fort Joy where it is because it's clearly wrong on the art map (even without the tilting, it's still much too close) which is also different to the cutscene.

Hmm.

Quick experiment. Well quite slow given that I'm doing it, but wondering if I can splat the DOS2 map into the existing attempt. I think it works, in principle, though the scale and/or exact orientation are maybe a bit off. As a quick proof of concept I think it's not unreasonable though.



The main thing is that the entire peninsula/blob/whatevs containing Driftwood, the oilfields etc would have to be extended in the general south-east direction to it scales reasonably well, I think.

Various other thoughts and observations. First, considering the cut-scene map posted earlier in this topic and the "cloth map" shown later on, they don't totally agree with each other. The scaling is a bit odd, so I guess the latter is a reworking of the former, or they at least have a common ancestor. Not that it helps very much. Obviously the position of Fort Joy in the cloth map is ludicrous since it's barely two ship's lengths from Driftwood.



So what do I do with that? I dunno really.

The other thing I was pondering is if the Driftwood-Arx peninsula can be crammed between Cyseal and Yuthul Gor. I was starting to think it couldn't, and maybe it should be a separate landmass anyway. Both might be wrong. First, does it fit? Oo-er missus etc. Here's the "cloth" map outline superimposed over the above map. It reveals nothing useful in terms of how it might be integrated but it does show that there's room for it, using Fort Joy as a useful reference for scale.



But that does leave the gnarly issue of the gnarly coastline in the "differences" picture. I'm not really sure how to view that. Was it simply for dramatic effect? Actually, I think it was. But I also can't help noticing the huge oval that the outline of the coasts and islands creates, as illustrated a bit more clearly below in my inept map-merging effort: seems to be a design decision, but I dunno if that was with something in particular in mind or just a convenient way of arranging things. My inclination is to go with the "dramatic effect" explanation because it's more convenient!



And why not make it another landmass? I may have misremembered the comment that Arx is south of Aleroth, or taken it much too literally as meaning due south, but I rather like the idea. I also like the idea of DD's Dark Forest and DOS's Haunted/Phantom/whatevs forest being one and the same, which is what I'd originally suggested, and actually I think the scary forest to the north-west of DOS2's map with its werewolves and deathfog and so on may also be a part of the same murky and tangled woodland. I'm sure there was other stuff but I've forgotten in the time it took me to type this.

It does seem that there's a lot of interpretation involved, so I could theoretically squash it in wherever I want: "all I need is a big enough hammer". I'd just prefer to do so in a way that actually makes some sense.

Have you seen this map ? https://www.deviantart.com/makotomitsunari/art/Divinity-Original-Sin-2-Map-of-Rivellon-778063021
Him/Her talked about using your map for inspiration. Maybe this helps you as well .

Divinity Original Sin 2: Map of Rivellon by Makoto Mitsunari

I have seen it and it's an interesting take on things. I don't quite agree with it but that's as meaningful as saying to someone that I don't agree with their favourite food! They're a subjective take on something that isn't well documented, what there is tends to be inconsistent (especially e.g. compass directions) and even if there is an official world map behind the scenes, I suspect that it'll never see the light of date and is probably revised (i.e. substantially changed!) every time they work on the story.

Makoto's vision of a map featuring multiple landmasses vs. a single one is particularly noteworthy to me as is that their map represents Ferol on a more realistic scale as I feel it's disproportionately large in "our" map.

It might be interesting for me to get their thoughts, whether for this particular project or just my own curiosity.

I should also add that the map isn't mine: I came up with some of the suggestions, though I forget how many and whether any were especially novel without re-reading the entire topic again, but the actual cartography is by Renwex. He seems to have some experience with regard to mapping and I think the intent was to produce a sort of topological map as the first stage in creating something much grander and more detailed, but for whatever reason (because people have other commitments like RL, most likely) it went unfinished. I've recently attempted to get hold of him both on and off forum; we'll see if he replies, though I'd rather not harangue him!

In the meantime I may turn my own hand to some interpretation of what I've detailed above. I think my problem isn't so much a lack of vision and creativity (though the lack of any usefully competent image editing skills is a bit of a hindrance!) but that I tend to not be bold enough when I think "actually that could work", and tend to leave it to someone else to make the difficult decisions! But actually the above could be made to work if I would stop asking myself "does this really work?" and simply get on with it.

Edit: included Makoto's picture. DeviantArt certainly doesn't make it easy to link to people's images...

Some experimentation in order to try to properly integrate Reaper's Coast into that tidy little space between Cyseal and Yuthul Gor. Easy, right...? *cough*

So what I've done, based on my merged cut-scene and cloth maps, is that I've scaled and straightened up the Reaper's Coast area according to the lines of longitude and though it created its own awkwardness, a couple of interesting things became apparent. First I could move the Cyseal/Phantom Forest area actually placing Hunter's Edge where there's a settlement shown on the cut-scene and the coastlines overlap quite well, so I'm inclined to go for that.

This opened up a sort of liability but also an opportunity for where to place Yuthul Gor: I needed to finish off the bottom jaggedy bit of Reaper's Coast with something and... well, there it is. My reasoning also being that as it has a not totally dissimilar climate to Fort Joy, its latitude makes sense, plus it's definitely close enough to Cyseal to explain those raiding parties. It comes at the cost of moving it away from where the original DD map places it, but given that there's no actual detail I've decided I have the artistic freedom to interpret that as "vaguely somewhere in this direction rather than actually right here".

Obviously it's extremely poorly finished and I would need to work on at least the coastline's details but my instinct is that they kind of "feel" about right.



Todo:

• Check the orientation of Fort Joy is still correct: it looks a bit off to me.
• Decide on that awkward blob of land south of Orobas Fjords: I'm ambivalent about that, might work, might not.
• Properly integrate the Hunter's Edge map with the outline of Reaper's Coast.
• Join the Phantom Forest and the Dark Forest as I've always asserted they're one and the same. And probably very big.
• Look at real-world maps to see how coastlines actually work in detail and add, well, details.
• Properly follow contour and other demarcation lines, both of existing maps and new areas.
• Add rivers, lakes, other details in hopefully likely places.
• Add missing settlements and label everything.
• Argh panic etc

At present the main thing I'm uncertain about is the exact placement of Arx. I'm still inclined to try to move it all around a bit so it is more south of Aleroth, but in order to create a convincing bay/whatever-it-is-that-Arx-is-in as well as having room to continue the Dark Forest southwards (albeit with a western detour) I may need to make the map even taller, which I'm not 100% certain about.

What the map doesn't include: Nameless Isle and Hiberheim, as my understanding is that they're on different planes of existence, and places like the lizard empire which I'm fairly certain is on a completely different continent. Red Prince was looking to the west, for example.

Another quick and no less dirty attempt to see how it would look. Actually I think I prefer it.

Latest update on my glacial but oddly time-consuming progress. I realised some angles and stuff were off so I've corrected them. Seems that the DOS2 in-game maps now seem to fit into their respective locations a bit better, shown here overlaid onto the thing I'm working there (they probably won't be in the final version... if a "final version" ever happens!) though I still need to properly adapt the bits of coastline to a greater or lesser extent, in addition to the above list of various stuff I need to do. I've annotated this one as anybody still following has probably completely lost track of what I'm on about.

I also need to find a better font: my installation of Gimp can find eleventy billion variants on the same bunch of stuff but has nothing vaguely interesting so I think tidying them up is another major project for me to do. Ugh.

Various random tasks still happening as the fancy takes me, in no particular order, which is I suppose much as expected. My current one is integrating the city of Arx into the coastline which has proven awkward. I have half a dozen different options which fall into two broad categories, which are whether I gnaw away at some of the surrounding islands so that there's sea where there's supposed to be (which looks a bit artificial... then again, a RL city may well have that sort of artificialness where water access is important, and Arx is criss-crossed by waterways which may be natural rivers or canals or a mixture of the two) or to leave the "flamboyant" islets around its periphery alone; though I felt both will need the coastline between the city's south and the mainland to be a bit more coherent, and for their to be an albeit perilous route to the harbour.



My inclination is to go with option 1, which involves the smallest amount of changes to the land as represented by the cloth map if I'm just going to stick with the current red splotch style of showing a city, which I may as well. In addition, as the final published map will be something like 800-1000px across unless anyone really wants something bigger) then any details in the actual city overlay will be completely lost anyway.

And if I do find an overlay I'll need to do a bit more work and find one that I'm allowed to use and doesn't have big red dots highlighting points of interest! This one I swiped from a game guide (I forget whose--sorry!)

Edit: oh, and the landscape is completely unfinished; in fact unstarted, really, as this is an exercise in finding the outlines of the relevant bits. That'll all be wiped and redone.

Edit 2: also for the record this is the part of the DOS2 cloth map I used as the original outline for the coast and islands. I had to rotate it 76⁰ anticlockwise in order for it to match the outline of the in-game city, which is a similar (but not identical) rotation required to get the "welcome to Reaper's Coast" cutscene to align properly (-67⁰).



I'm also hoping I'm not going to need to retrace the outline, my map's outline seems a bit more fuzzy than it did compared with the cloth map.

Turns out that my outline was fine, I'd just messed up the map with too many select-by things when working on getting Arx to fit. But fortunately the outline itself is (seemingly) okay.

I've no idea when (or if) I'll be close to finished, though. I'm kinda knackered now: doing something I've no real experience with using only Gimp and a mouse isn't really the most easy nor productive way to get stuff done. I spoke to Makoto who suggested that map creation software might be helpful. "Hurrr, never thought of that!" I think to myself and then continue to do things the hard way. Why am I an idiot? I suppose everyone needs a pastime.

Today's endeavour was choosing what I considered to be sensible fonts for labelling stuff rather than the generic Ariel-esque I've been using so far, which looks quite out of place. I should read the terms and conditions before I release it though.

Now I need a curry. This may be why I'm feeling fat.



Maybe it's time to look for that software that makes life easier, even though it means something new to learn. Actually, no, order curry, then look at software. And font licensing terms.

Yes, 1 looks fine, especially since it will only be a small part of a larger map.

Cool, thanks, I'll do that then!

Still working on an actually coherent coastline but slowly getting there. I hadn't expected it would take so long! Hopefully now mostly a case of joining up the respective bits and making the new areas not look like they were drawn in crayon by a two year old...

Latest in my rather random and piecemeal updates. Still much to do but working through it in no particular order. I've decided it's a good time to pause for reflection as I've just done the central mountain range (this may or may not be the Dragon's Spine) and I'm left feeling it's a bit namby-pamby. There is a reason for that, I mean other than the fact that I'm often not bold enough and I remember my art teacher telling me off about that very many years ago. But the reason is my idea about having the Dark/Phantom/Haunted/etc forests being one and the same, a giant impenetrable mass of green scariness. So I've prioritised that and I'm now scratching my head: the mountains don't seem to pitiful if you imagine the forest also being on a lot of the higher ground, but I dunno. I still think it needs more mountain. Anybody have any thoughts?