• The work is accessible as a branch in CVS. You can see it by doing cvs up -r lalo-pupland on your maps-bigworld cvs checkout. In SVN the lalo-pupland branch has been added to the maps tree however it currently does not contain any of the new work and at the second is just a copy of the Trunk branch.

• Weather will break above a certain level (I haven't tested which one). That's because these maps make the world non-rectangular; the weather code should probably be changed to assume empty, plain ocean on missing tiles. See also fix_weather . It has also been discussed that it would probably be nice for the weather system to change its idea of “poles”, since even if Bigworld is a planet as we understand it, the area we have mapped is not the whole planet (in fact the Scorn/Navar continent hardly qualifies as a continent – it's roughly the size of one of the islands that make up Hawaii). Note that without that change, Lone Town will be a very cold place not that that's a bad thing, might be reasonable (at least gives a reason for being “lone”)

• Nurnberg is basically ready; Castle Eureca, Kurte, the huts, barbarian ruins, tower of ordeal, cave pass, and rebel port are linked (in but not out). There are still some maps from the Pupland quest to link: power plant, research facility, army camp. Lone Town is placed, but empty (buildings need to be copy-pasted in place). The big port was promoted into its own town – for the lack of a better name, “port Pupland”. (So all you port-loving map makers, here's an entire new port for you to play with.)

• Rainbow Islands aren't even started yet, which is funny, because I remember moving Red Town. Guess I didn't like the result and reverted it. If you want to see where it's going to be, follow the brick road to the southernmost end with a dm ; you'll get to the lighttower. Fly southwest over sea, you'll get to the bigger island of a cute archipelago; that's Red Island, and you should be near the site of Red Town. All the way west of Red Island is a sandy area where the beach will be. On the north there's a peninsula with a mountain, perfect for the tower. I'll probably only start Rainbow Islands once Pupland (continental) is finished, tested, and landed.

• The individual maps were moved out of /pup_land to conform to our standards; so now they'll be in /lone_town, /nurnberg, /port_pupland, /red_island, and those that don't fit in any of these, /quests/pupland or /quests/rainbow_islands. (I'm taking the liberty of using red_island rather than red_town, following the example of Lake Country and dragonisland which AFAIK are the closest things we have.)

• Then all exits have to be fixed to point to the new places; the ones that went to /pup_land/world, /pup_land/lone_town/town, /pup_land/nurnberg/city and so on have to go to /world/*, the others have to conform to the new map locations. This is somewhat herculean, but I believe we have a couple of scripts in Info to do just that. I haven't looked into them yet, but if you want to figure them out, run them, and commit the results to my branch, I'll be very grateful. (Bear in mind since the islands aren't done yet, you may need to do it again later.)

• And I have to check all pupland maps for changes in the last few months; since I moved all of them to a different dir, a simple cvs merge won't help me integrate changes. Notably, my Nurnberg doesn't have the dragon hangar

• Ancient Pupland is another beast entirely, and not even part of this project. I've taken care to put things in places and shapes that make Ancient Pupland mostly make sense, but no guarantees. It's arguable whether we want to redo Ancient Pupland to fit the bigworld scale; even if we do, though, that's a separate project.
  • IMHO Ancient Pupland should be done too, and to me it doesn't make sense to merge the bigworld pupland into the main tree until Ancient Pupland matches it — Alex Schultz 2006/08/14 17:59
  • Red, I think you're setting the bar too high. If we say “we won't merge until it's perfect”, it will just never get done. As it stands now, ancient Pupland already doesn't match modern Pupland 100%, by design; so I have no problem if for a few months, ancient Pupland feels like a stylised version of Pupland in smaller scale. I've taken care to choose a world map that allows you to imagine that – compare my map below with the map of ancient Pupland. The problem is that by not merging, all fixes to these maps have to happen in both branches, which means much more effort; also, there's less people testing and contributing to them. So I'm for a gradual approach; merge the continent when it's good enough, then do the islands, then do ancient Pupland, then work on “monsterland” quests. Then maintenance for already merged maps can resume normal model, freeing me to work on the stuff that's still missing.

— Lalo Martins 2006/08/14 06:07

Update: The map shown here was never committed to SVN, so it's not available for use. A new continent will need to be created.

It has been brought to my attention that there's some naming confusion with the whole Pupland thing. Notably, the sign in Lone Town (near the airlines) says:

Island  Name : Pup Land
Country Name : Shining Kingdom
City    Name : Lone Town

And since I'm putting the region we know as Pupland as the westernmost tip of a larger “continent”, people have asked me what will things be named. So here's my take:

This historically refers to the westernmost peninsula of the continent, known as “Old Pupland”, where Lone Town is; the next peninsula that connects it to the continent, known as “New Pupland”, where you find Castle Eureca and the Port; and the gulf between New Pupland and Nurnberg, which predictably enough is “Gulf of Pupland”. Note that by this arrangement, Nurnberg is not in Pupland, strictly speaking; I believe that fits the story. (This might mean that if we ever redo Ancient Pupland, I'd put Shining Village in a different place, not where Nurnberg is now. I even know where I'd like it to be.)

That's the kingdom founded by Siegfried and ruled by Eureca. It extends from Old Pupland in the west to the Shining Wall on the East, from the badlands North of Nurnberg to Violet Island, southernmost of the Rainbow Islands. (It's unclear to me whether Rainbow Islands are part of the kingdom; they seem rather unaffected by the war. But as a nod to the original developers of Pupland, I'm assuming they are.)

Things that come from this kingdom are known as “Shinian”; people are “Shiniese”. They speak “Shinespeak”, which for reasons unknown sounds like a dialect of the Old Empire tongue (as much as the New Imperial spoken in Scorn and Navar). Shinespeak and New Imperial are mutually intelligible, with small differences in vocabulary and grammar; so if some Shiniese says something that sounds funny to you, that's because it's Shinespeak, and not because the original authors of Pupland were Japanese with good but imperfect English skills

Some people believe the Shining Kingdom was founded by sailors from the Old Empire, just like Scorn. Since both Pupland and Scorn are on the West side of their continents, and more or less aligned on longitude, that contributes to the theory that the Old Empire lands were far to the West. It's likely that the soldiers from the Old Empire conquered first Old Pupland, then New Pupland, then the area up to the wall from the monsters that seem to be masters of the continent. Shiniese, however, shun this theory; it doesn't fit with their stories about their mythical hero Siegfried.

The “easy living” part of the Shining Kingdom, south of Pupland. Five larger islands give the archipelago its name: Red Island, northernmost and second largest, has Red Town and the Pup Airlines, connecting the Islands to the world. Little Orange and secluded Yellow to the East are the favourites of the rich and powerful; Green to the south, with its luxurious nature, teems with Elves , Gaea worshippers, treasure hunters, and dangerous wild animals. Lonely Blue Island, far South of Green Island, is virtually unexplored. And the largest of them, Violet Island (Southeast of Red, straight East of Green), is home to pacific islandfolk, mostly fishermen and rice planters who keep all the Rainbow population fed.

(Yes, six islands. Wikipedia tells me most people are unable to discern seven colours in a rainbow, and on medieval times it might even have been five.)

That's what Shiniese call the area East of the Shining Wall. It's dominated by monsters , which seem more powerful and organised than on most parts of the world. Only the most powerful heroes were able to walk out of sight on this dangerous territory alive, and only three have ever returned. One of them was Lord Eureca himself on his youth; he didn't say much about what he found, but years later when he was crowned, one of his first acts was to order the only gap in the wall closed and permanently guarded.

This is the name the old scrolls in the Royal Library give to the continent as a whole. They also have maps of all its area, and for reasons unknown, Lord Eureca only allows a few trusted scholars to even look at these maps…