The Cartographer #1

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This newsletter, The Cartographer, composed by a team of Cartographers and Community Figures through-out AtWar, new and old, that have come together to bring you a newsletter aimed at bringing guides on the Map-Editor/AtWar altogether, legitimate debates in AW, healthy drama in AtWar, reviews, interviews, and more. We do not aim to be biased nor do we aim to start flamewars. We hope to bring new releases bi-weekly and if not, whenever we can! There is a lot to report on in the Cartography community. We'd like to also thank the Imperial Academy's contribution.

Enjoy!

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Creed, a new cartography clan on AtWar aims for new heights.

In an interview with the clan's founder, Vertiven, we found out that Creed focuses more on the creativity of its members - with pride in originality. Giving each member that creates a map to have their map placed in the spotlight. From start to finish they guide their members in the right direction, giving them all a chance to not only become a popular cartographer in AtWar, but to enjoy the game and expand its maps and in the end bringing new content to the community.

Creed consists (and will consist) of fellow people who also make maps of their own, learning and achieving their highest standard possible. Its founder has also collaborated with other clans such as Aloysian Guard and certain people in Valkyria to help out with making, teaching, testing out, and playing maps. We also had looked into what kind of maps they are already making, however we are unable to publicly disclose this as they didn't want to spoil it or give away ideas to someone who could make the map faster and copy it.

Creed is still looking for more cartographers in the clan and is currently in the middle of creating a guide for cartography to use in the clan, to teach their members who wish to create maps. So if you want to learn how to make maps, we highly suggest you go there!

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The Cartographer Editor Team wanted to give the community insight about a new map that has been released. So, we interviewed Witch-Doctor himself.


What made you want to make this map? Which editor did you use and how long did it take you to complete it?

Witch-Doctor:
Wanted to show that competitive players can make quality maps and scenarios. I initially used html5 editor to make my map. I actually finished the map itself and added all the cities. This took about 2 months of work. Then, I wanted to delete the USSR and redraw it. I ended up permanently breaking my map while trying to delete Russia. I waited about 3 weeks for Clovis to fix it and I was also super burned it about it too. I got tired of waiting and decided to completely redo it in Silverlight. It took a months of hard painstaking work to recreate the map in Silverlight. Most of it was because I wanted to up the quality on everything.



Did you research before you made the map? Are your borders accurate?

Witch-Doctor:
I had to do quite a bit of research when planning for the scenario. My goal was to have a long scale scenario involving 7 players and I took inspiration from how other scenarios like ostfront and ror balanced it. The borders are as accurate as I can make them with resources available. I had to make some ahistorical merging of territories for the sake of the 7 player limit.


Do you think your map has convinced other cartographers and future cartographers to make more maps for AW, despite editor being in a bad condition?

Witch-Doctor:
I know I've inspired some people with my implementation of a "research tree". The editor is an awful place right now, the admins are insisting we cannot make new Silverlight maps so brand new map makers are being screwed. I didn't see the html5 editor being viable for a long time.


and to end the interview, we asked for a guide on the map, which can be found here. The map is also based on the Second Sino-Japanese war from 1937-1945.

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No Cartographer can make a map on the game without a good working map editor. And so far, it has been somewhat of a struggle to get to where we need to be on it's progress.

The Editors of The Cartographer debated deeply if we should begin the start of our guides for map editing yet, and they all came to the conclusion that certain stuff needed to be addressed first.

The editor has had troubles finding its bugs and fixing them due to not enough people going to the test server and testing out the editor. Without this testing, Admins will have to do it themselves, which can be hours of work.

Therefore, The Cartographer is recommending every player to go to the test server and begin testing maps, making maps, making units, etc. Get enough of it in to help out the admins and discover the source of the problems, so it will take not only less time to code it but less time to release the editor. If you find any bugs, they should be reported here.

Our series of guides will begin with our next release of The Cartographer.

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The Cartographer wants to ensure AtWar stays stable in map creation, diversity, creativity, and efficiency. Therefore, we have assembled a team of experienced Cartographers on AW that have created their own programs to teach players wanting to join the current generation of Cartographers. The Cartographer also wants to keep including guest writers, who are people in the community who have their work featured on the newsletter.

We wanted to first give the public a chance to ask any question relating to the map editor(s) and will be handing out emails set up for AW usage so the questions and answers can be private.

The list of Cartographers who will answer your questions are:

Professor Adus, Lecturer of Strategic Cartography and Statistical Analysis
a.pulcher@imperialunion.org

Professor Panda, Lecturer of Strategic Cartography
p.pulcher@imperialunion.org

Professor WaiserReich, Lecturer of Innovative Sciences
w.pulcher@imperialunion.org

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