Questions about map making

@Navalland

1. 100 appears to be the maximum.

2. You can either use a raster graphics editor software such as Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Gimp or Paint .net or alternatively a vector graphics software such as Illustrator, Affinity Designer or Inkscape.

Whatever you take the final result needs to be a png-file that matches the basetile image, so it is recommended to use the basetile image as underlying layer.

@Navalland The 100% is the TripleA-restriction. Of course the basis for the 100% is the underlying image.
You might run into issues when you resize (here enlarge) a bitmap image, as you would need to resize as well the basetile image as the relief. While the resulting relieftile-glitches are irrelevant for the game, the basetile image is critical, as enlarging can lead for example to broken lines what would result for example in incorrect polygon results.

So for map makers it is important to have their bitmaps at reasonable sizes right from the beginning, as a later enlarging might cause problems and might lead to some careful editing work.

@Navalland The Image Breaker is still part of the internal “Map Creator Tools”, see “Step 2 Map Utilitites”. This is used to break both of the full images into the tiles (as well the base tiles as the relief tiles), that Triple A needs. You can reconstruct the complete images from the tiles, using the Tile Image Reconstructor (see “Other Optional Things”). It has never been removed.

@Navalland I am not super familiar with map making. So I cannot reproduce what you just have reported. I am not sure what “View Map Blend” has to do with basetiles and relieftiles.

Please take a look for example at the wwII-v3 map.

The basetile image defines the territories, seazones and borders only. Those are relevant for the polygon grabber.
The relieftile image only adds another partly transparent layer that brings for example the streetmap-like view and the different blue scales of seazones.

In the map.properties file you define the pixel size of your map. This pixel size must be exactly the same as the size of your images.
In the image editor software you now would work on images of this size.
You would now create a base layer (basetile) and draw the outlines of the map. After that you would add another layer (with tramsparency ) on top and add for example the cartography and other stuff you might want. This additional layer is the relieftile image.

You would save both layers as separate png-files. The image breaker is used to break the basetile-image into the baseTiles directory of your map. Then you break the relieftile-image into the reliefTiles directory.

Maybe you know all of this - I cannot tell from what you wrote. But the above is a very short “how to” .
Also the “View Map Blend” option seems to be independent of these image files.

However my knowledge of this process ends at this point, so in case you have further, more detailled questions I recommend to look and ask here:

https://forums.triplea-game.org/category/28/map-making
https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/918/map-maker-resources

@Navalland

What exactly do you mean by “make good relief tiles”?
You make tiles by breaking the image into parts (tiles).

Or are you talking about a tutorial on how to create/paint a relief-image itself, before breaking it into tiles?

(For map-making in general, this is a good source:
https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/blob/master/docs/map-making/map-and-map-skin-making.md
Just in case you don’t know this link.)

@Navalland

In that case you need to be familiar with image editing software as I mentioned above.

Which software are you using for image editing? There should be tutorials on the web on how to work with layers, transparency, etc.
This is more about image editing rather than TripleA, then.

@Navalland
Have you already created a working basetile-image?

@Navalland OK, so that is your background layer.

In brief:
On other layers apply an image of a greyscale streetmap to the territory outlines and create some cloud-like effect on the seazone-layer. The territory layer should have a high level of transparency, you need to experiment here. When you are ready merge the territory layer and the seazone layer to one png-file, preserving transparency there. This will be your relief-image. Of course you can apply whatever visual effect you want there.

I found this tutorial for creating “clouds”:
https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/17972-make-real-clouds/

Maybe something similar exists for GIMP, too.

For further details please try to reach out to active map-makers. I can only give you this quite superficial information.