Grasslands (Part 4)

Last time I finished up the basic generation of grassland symbols, which looked like this:

Now I'm going to look at placing these on the map.

Previously I made an initial pass at placing these symbols on the map, and had something like this:

In the upper part of the image I just placed symbols throughout the grasslands.  But that ends up clashing with a lot of other map elements; in the bottom half I added some code to make the grassland symbols avoid forests, mountains, rivers and coastlines.

Here's an example of a map using the more hand-drawn symbols:

The changes I've made to make the symbols more hand-drawn help quite a bit, but I find the overall effect to be cluttered and unappealing when applied over the entire map.  This is probably one reason you rarely see it used this way by human map-makers.

One way to address this is to reduce the visual impact of the grassland symbols by coloring them to match the land and reducing their opacity:

This ends up looking like a land texture.  This is an improvement and a useful option, but I still don't like the overall look.

The real problem here is having the same symbols over most of the map.  Generally speaking, I think the best fantasy maps have a lot of variety, so that every spot on the map looks like there's something interesting happening there -- not just a repeat of stuff that is everywhere else on the map.  And visually, if you have something happening over most of the map, it's better to leave that blank (background) to not distract from where things are different.

I can think of a couple of ways to reduce the amount of grasslands in an interesting way.  The easiest is to avoid putting symbols near cities.  The idea here is that the areas furthest away from the cities are the unsettled, more wild areas of the map, so we'll use the grasslands symbol to indicate that.

I'm doing something pretty simple here -- just eliminating grassland within a fixed distance of a city.  This works pretty well to make the grass more sparse and the map more interesting.  It also has a couple of drawbacks.  It's hard to pick a fixed distance that works well on all maps.  And it treats all cities the same way, where big cities probably should push back the wilderness more than smaller cities.  In the long run, I plan to have something in the world generation that decides what is really wilderness and what is settled.

I've colored the land green for these illustrations, but it's interesting to look at a map with a traditional brown land color:

This has quite a different feel to it.  To me, adding the grassland symbols causes me to see all the tan land as desert or wasteland.  Making the symbols green isn't any better:

Most of the reference maps I have that use this kind of marking for grasslands are black and white, or have a green land color, probably to avoid this problem.

I have a few example maps that use color to indicate biomes (i.e., grasslands versus desert).  I haven't done a lot with coloring the map to reflect the biomes, but I do have a simple version implemented that I use primarily for debugging.  It just fills in light green for grass, yellow for desert, dark green for forests, and so on.  If I turn that on and use the grassland symbols it looks like this:

It's nice to have a clear differentiation between the biomes on the map, especially where deserts meet the grassland.  On the other hand, deserts are actually fairly rare, so it isn't every map that will have a nice differentiation like this one.  But a problem with putting biomes on the map like this is that there's plenty of grasslands biome that doesn't get symbols, because I'm still avoiding putting grassland symbols where they would clash with rivers, the coast and etc.  As an alternative, I can  apply the biome coloring only where there's a grasslands symbol:

This looks pretty good, although it still has the problem that marking grassland in this way makes it seem as if everything else on the map is desert.  I'll continue to experiment with this and see if I can find some more appealing approaches.

Meanwhile, I can look at some variants for the grassland symbol.  One variant is to increase the height of all the blades, to make the tuft more leggy:

The opposite variant is to take away all the arc in the blades and make all the blades the same length:

These short straight tufts is an approach I've seen some human map-makers use.  I think both of these variants look pretty good.

That's basically all for this kind of grass symbol; next time I look at marking grasslands with a different sort of symbol.