How to port Azgaar Fantasy Map Generator maps into Galimulator

This guide is for porting maps from the fantastic Fantasy Map Generator to Galimulator, since they provide very nice randomly generated worlds and some good real life templates too.

How to port custom maps into Galimulator

First of all, how do you port any map into Galimulator? And what is Azgaar?

Well, on the first subject, I recommend consulting this guide to get a rough idea on how to add custom maps: http://blog.galimulator.com/8-modding/4-galimulator-map-making-in-4-9-and-onward
The gist is that the brightness of pixels in images can be used to place stars in a smart manner, and if you copy one of the .map files in the maps folder and modify it, you can even have custom backgrounds and density behavior. I will explain some details on how to do it for azgaar maps later on in the text.

How to make a quickmap with Azgaar

Credit to Li#5373 for doing this kind of thing first.
Onto Azgaar. Azgaar Fantasy Map Generator is a map making program and website online which lets you generate and make maps for worlds, starting off usually with a randomly generated map, then you can modify everything. The website is https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/ , and you can also download it as a program with the install button on the top left of the website.

We’re going to start off with a quickmap, and build up to making fancier galimulator maps from there.

To start off with, go to the website and let it load, and you’ll be greeted with something like this:
That’s a randomly generated map in the background, and a list of recent updates to the program. You can close the updates, and then you will navigate to the arrow on the top left and click it.
Here are the options for azgaar maps. First of all, all these buttons for layers turn them on and off, and for our purposes you can turn them all off.
It will probably look like this now. Now in the menu, navigate to Options. We will be generating new maps, and this is where you control the settings for that.
While there are a lot of choices here, only two matter for our purposes right now. If you modify the Heightmap, you can get different kinds of maps, including some presets for real world maps. If you modify the Points Number, you can make the map more or less detailed, with more or less complicated coastlines. Play around with those settings, and press New Map when you’re ready. You can also full screen the window (F11 on Windows) to get the map a bit larger. Each time you press “new map”, you’ll get a new map based on your choices you could select for this process.
I’ve settled on this map, and have decided to convert it into a quickmap, and here’s how you’ll do it.
First thing you’ll want to do is change the Style preset, click the dropdown and set it to Monochrome. If you did it correctly the entire screen should be black now.
Now, click the Select element: dropdown and set it to Landmass. You’ll see under it once you do that that “Fill” is set to black, #000000. If you click the black box, you’ll get a color selector tool. You’ll just want to click and hold on the rectangle of colors and drag the circle to the top left, a pure white. Should say #ffffff afterwards when you click out. All done correctly, this is the result:
Almost there, now you just hit Export
Just click .png on the top, and you’ve saved an image of this map to your computer. IMPORTANT: There is a good chance you’ll want to improve on this map for reasons mentioned later on, so also press Save in the menu and select “machine” to save an editable map azgaar can load to the computer, just so you don’t lose it.

Now, with your png, all you have to do now is take it from the downloads folder, and put it in the quickmaps folder of galimulator (SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Galimulator\data\maps\quickmaps), and when you go to create a map ingame, it’ll be an option! You will probably want to rename the image, but for sake of demonstration I will not.
Pretty good! However, while it is perfectly functional on the sim level right now, it’s visually a bit rough. This pure white makes it very hard to see many details of the sim, and it has too much intense contrast:

How to make a background image and .map file for Azgaar maps

Let’s polish our previous quickmap up. First we’ll make a new background image, then a map file to tie it all together.
Let’s go back to our map in azgaar, which if you had closed, you can press Load to open up the saved .map file (confusingly, different from the .map files of galimulator maps) and restore it.
Go back to Style, and change the style preset to Default again.
This would be a good background image mostly, but the white land is probably still a bit rough for Galimulator, since star regions in the game aren’t opaque, they’re translucent. So we’ll go back to Landmass in style, and this time drag the circle to the middle of the left side to get a neutral gray.
Then, we just export this image as a .png as well, and we’re done with making a better background image. This step however is subjective. Feel free to play around with the settings here and see if you find something you find prettier for the background image, if you want.

Now for the .map file, you’ll probably want to rename both of these images to something that recalls that one is for star positioning and one is background art. I tend to name them NameDensity and NameArt respectively. Then, drag them both into the Galimulator maps folder, but not the contained quickmaps folder.
Now, we just need to make a .map file for them. Copy and paste one of the existing .map files into the folder, and rename it to the name of the world. Right-click it, then select “Open with”.
Replace the text with the example text from
http://blog.galimulator.com/8-modding/4-galimulator-map-making-in-4-9-and-onward

name=Earth
density-file=earthdensity2.png
density-adjustment=500
background-image=decoratedearth.png
locations=earthcountries.merc
timenoun=Year
governments=earthgovs.json

Remove the governments and locations lines. Then after the = sign, set the name to the name you want, set the density-file to your density png, background-image to your art png, and timeNoun to whatever you want the timer to label its numbers as. Remove timeNoun if you want the default. I would also recommend setting the density-adjustment down a bit, maybe to like 100, but play around with the number ingame (it lets you modify it) til you like how many stars it can fit. Press “File”, and save it. Congrats, you made a fancier azgaar galimulator map.
(8000 stars, density 100)

How to make Azgaar Galimulator maps account for population density

Let’s go even fancier. Let’s incorporate biomes into our density calculations to get a more dynamic map. Go back to azgaar, and turn on biomes on the layer section. If you wave over the map you’ll see a variety of biome regions
Go to style and again set it to monochrome.
Navigate to the element “Biomes”.
You’ll see an option for a Filter, set the filter to None.
Now, go to Tools, and select Biomes at the top to get a new menu.
On the left of each biome on the list, you’ll see a color, and then you’ll also see a column saying habitability. Click the color of the top one.
Now, you see HSL: followed by three values. Change the third value of that HSL to match the habitability number you see for this biome, and press enter. You can now close it out. You’ll see the biome change color, and you will want to repeat this process for every biome. Afterwards you can close the menus and see the world now colored by habitability:
You can export this, and replace the old density image with this.
Finally, we can make a new art for this to reflect the biomes.
Go back to Tools, and open the Biomes menu back up. Click the little refresh button to remove the altered biome colors.
Now go back to Style, and set it to default.
Finally, set the biomes filter to grayscale.
There we go, workable art for Galimulator. This can replace the art file.

Finally, you’ll want to play around with the density adjustment setting in game, then change the .map file to have whatever density adjustment you prefer most. This should be roughly the result:

[fullautoSherman]

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[epicgamer]

helpful!