Scrolling map

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I'm still working on my top down scrolling shooter. Last weekend I decided to make the background map for my game. There is google maps with it's satellite photo's of the world, so I thought why not make a scrolling map from images of google maps. How did I do it? Simple, go to the google maps site and find a place / map that is suited. Of course chose satellite to get real images. I wanted some water in my background, so I made my background from images of the province Zeeland in the Netherlands. When you have the right location "Print Screen" and voila you have an image. You might want to cut the background image out of the "shot" by editing it in photoshop (or paint). Than go back to google maps and move the map. By pressing the "up" key you will move the map up, perfect if you don't want to change in the horizontal (x) direction. Move your map up and make a shot again, do the entire process. Make sure that you keep a small part of the previous map in your new map, so when you are going to attach them they will fit nicely. After shooting images it's time to attach the lose map images to get 1 big map image.

In my case, I was going a little far with it. I made 43 map images. Attaching the images together I had a big map of 626 x 14200 pixels. When you are working in photoshop, you might want to use the "save for web ..." option to make the quality lower and the file size smaller. My map was 15 mb but with "save for web ...", jpg, low quality it went from 15 mb to 700 kb!

I'm using the map in my game now. I had cut it up in 6 pieces because Flash/actionscript can't work with movie clips, which are more then 2500 pixels in width / height.

Here is the map, might be useful for someone who want to save the hours of print screens, cutting and attaching work ^_^


hmmm...... blogspot has decreased the image size with 10 fold