An unfinished LotR terrain - looking for interested to remove the "un"

Huh. What do you know, this place still existed. I joined up yeeears ago, thought it died. Mmh. Anyhow, to begin:

Me, I'm an old-timer terrainer, by some standards considered accomplished. A few months ago I worked on an ages-old dream of mine: to terrain the entirety of J.R.R. Tolkiens' Middle-earth, done not for some shoddy map, but for the creation itself, a tribute to Tolkien, and Peter Jackson's movies. Such was my intention - but now, several months later, with no work done for weeks on it, I'm starting to wonder if I'm really ever going to finish it.

I probably will, given another few years, and I'm not a stranger to patience. However, I am considering letting someone else chip in on the project, if anyone is interested - and judged by me to be, ah, up to the task. Understand, if you will - this terrain is dear to me, and though I fully intend to release it to whoever might be interested once it is finished, I'm not going to let someone make a mess of it all.

So what's this all about, then? Well. It's a biggie epic-sized map, 256*256, buffed up to 14 tiles, some of which are custom-made. Or, modified, in any case. It's a pretty close fit to http://www.geocities.com/puayc/artic..._earth_map.jpg

Everything west of the Anduin is finished - that is, Gondor, Rohan, the Shire, all those good ol' places are done. Well, I hardly ever reeeally finish anything - there's always something more that can be done, that's my motto. Currently the map's counting a bit more than 5000 doodads, some of which is pathing blockers, most of it being trees. I can safely say that every single one of those trees have been placed with care for each and every one of them.

Further, as the finished area expands, I place out cities and towns which I arduously try not to make up out of thin air, but base either on pure Tolkien lore, or, failing that, something as mainstream-accepted as possible. There's currently around 140 cities placed, and over 50 varieties of trees. And that's just for the parts west of the Anduin - roughly half the map.


Anyhow. If you've read all of that, and have gotten interested in any wee way, be it if you're actually thinking of, perhaps, doing some terraining or else just curious... well, here's the place to say so.


Pictures below being (1) of southern Gondor, from Dol Amroth to Pelargir, (2) Minas Tirith - Osgiliath - Minas Morgul and (3) the Shire from Michel Delving to Bree.

Looks really great from what I can tell. The detail is amazing, you really have a knack at terraining the cities. I think the compressed textures of the doodads clashes a bit with the low-res terrain but that's not your fault.

I'm kind of spacey when it comes to working on things, jumping back and forth between interests but I'd love to take a look at it.

oi ur back!

I admired ur work back then

wow realy amazing, id love to see the whole thing lol.

Get some people together and make a game out of this, it would be epic.

Ah. Well, DungeonM, if you're interested, poke me a bit more and I will send over a copy of the map to you. Probably will need UMSWE to open it, but that's hardly a big deal.

Anyhow, thank-ee, people, for... well, liking it. I suppose you're right about the textures, DungeonM, though I've hardly given it thought - but I do avoid any tiles which stand out - at the most I have a few flower-tiles here and there, otherwise I try to use only very bland ones.

And weg... hmmh... you know, your name does sound familiar. Could be some guy I used to talk to in WoW, but anyway nice to know there's still old crew hanging around here.

And Gorman, hah, I'd love to see the whole thing, too, in game form. The idea is for it to be a sort of... well, Rome: Total War-style kind of game. But I mostly just hope to ever finish the damn terrain - actually making a game out of it isn't really my concern.