How can I draw territories ?

[panzersam]

Hi everyone, I'm beginning to contruct a map about East Asia. When I created the map i can't understand how to draw the territories as same as the real map. Should I need to use my mouse to draw all the border by clicking it again and again? I need to draw every countries and counties about Asia, can everyone could spare sometime teach me with photos display, so that I can follow everythings, Thank you.

[Grandma Ruth]

Hi Sam
I've not been around much so we haven't "met". Nice to know you!
My way of drawing boundaries is to use the paintbrush tool. I suppose if you wanted a broken line you would have to click on and off, as you said. Don't know of any other wy to do it, maybe someone else will.

Editor screenshot - click to enlarge

[Wolverine@MSU]

If you've delineated Territories with the tool just below the one Ruth shows, you can check a box to make the boundries visible. Then they will automatically appear on the map.

[OilCan]

Should I need to use my mouse to draw all the border by clicking it again and again? I need to draw every countries and counties about Asia, can everyone could spare sometime teach me with photos display, so that I can follow everythings...

Yes, you have to use your mouse to draw in the borders of the territories. It is a slow process if you have a lot of territories on a large map. And it is hard if you are trying to replicate real life borders. But, it is the only way. Use a small brush size to draw the borders and then use a large brush size to fill in between the borders.

Save your map with a new name after finishing each territory and use these maps as restore points.

I have attached an RTF document about how to draw territories. Hope this helps.

[Stoker]

Something I do to draw territories accurately is to take screen shots of the map- sometimes in sections if it is large, and then open them in Photoshop. There you can overlay a real map of the area scaled to fit the RT3 map section that shows boundaries and exact river and city locations.You can also maximize the minimap in either the editor or the game and use this map image for a comparison overlay as well. You can't export this back into RT3 but you can keep it open in photoshop and either Alt+Tab back and forth between RT3 and PS, or you can open RT3 in windowed mode and have them side by side OR you can do as I sometimes do and have one opened on my laptop and the other on my PC. This gives you a pretty good template so that you can see exactly where to draw and place things on your map.

Happy Railroading, and good luck with your map!

[Gumboots]

I was just drawing territories last night. The best way I've found is to have Google Earth and RRT3 editor open at the same time, with the longitude/latitude grid on in Google Earth. This makes it comparatively easy, although still tedious.

The map editor gives a constant tracking of cursor position in map pixels (upper right of screen, in white text). The map I was playing with was 897x1025. From MicroDEM, I knew the limits of the map were 25.000 S to 39.992 S latitude, and 140.043 E to 154.948 E longitude. With these figures, it was simple enough to set up a couple of basic formulae to give me a game map X and Y positioning for any point.

With the zoom feature and the grid of Google Earth (set to decimal degrees), getting an exact position for any point is quick and easy. This can then be used to plot territory borders, or cities, or any other feature, to a very high degree of accuracy and with minimal work. It works like this:

Longitude, in my part of the world, increases from left to right. The means that to find the X positioning on the game map in question, all I needed to do was use longitude, minus left map limit in degrees (140.043) divided by the difference between western map limit and eastern map limit in degrees (15.456) then multiplied by the map width in pixels (897).

897((Longitude - 140.043)/15.456) = Point on map, from left to right.

Which can be simplified to:

58.036(Longitude - 140.043) = Point on map, from left to right.

Latitude is a little tricker around here, because it increases from top to bottom, while the map editor takes positioning from bottom to top. This doesn't add much complication though. What you do is use 1, minus latitude minus upper map limit in degrees (25.000) divided by the difference between upper map limit and lower map limit (14.992) multiplied by map height in pixels (1025).

1025(1 - ((Latitude - 25.000)/14.992)) = Point on map, from bottom to top.

Using these formulae and a basic calculator, I was able to accurately plot the borders for Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, and paint the territories, in a few hours. Around half of the length of these borders have very complex shapes, as you'll see if you check them out on a map.