Of lately I have been experimenting with different scales for a total map of the Great Valley. For the area of the Great Valley (that is the Big wall is completely inside this area and there would be a little rim of Mysterious Beyond on every end of the map) I am planning a square of 15kilometers or 225 square-kilometers (for reference, this would be roughly the area of the city (not the much larger metropolitan area) of Boston which covers roughly 232.14 square-kilometers ). Because of the need for small details (e.g. narrow gaps which would allow for a character of Ducky's or Petrie's size to fit through but not for a Littlefoot, Cera, or Spike sized) I was originally thinking of doing a map with a scale of 1pixel = 20 centimeters which would have resulted in a map of 75000pixels square. This proved just as unwieldy and space consuming (in every sense of the word) as a smaller version of 60000 pixels square which would have meant one pixel to cover 25 centimeters.
There is no way but to break it all up into several maps of different scales and after some experimenting I think the best system would be one of three scales with each map being 1500 pixels (quite manageable) square.
The largest scale would then be 1pixel = 10meters so the edge of the map would be 15kilometers of the game landscape. This map would be an overview of the Great Valley and copied and stretched sections from it (I must make sure to use a vector based graphic format) would serve as the rough basis for the much more detailed maps of a larger scale. This map would be way to rough as any basis for the 3D maps and is therefore only a reference to get an idea of the total valley.
This large map would be broken up into 25 smaller and more detailed maps in which one pixel would make for a distance of 2meters. In case of such a map the 1500 pixels edge would be 3 kilometers of the game landscape.
Maps of this scale could be used as a basis for 3D maps as 2meters per pixel offer enough detail while at the same time 9 square-kilometers (3x3kilometers) are large enough to allow for a sensible "section" of the Great Valley. For example the part of the Valley map we have seen so far (which will have to undergo some editing and refining) would probably fit easily on a map of this scale.
Finally this 9 square-kilometers could be broken down into yet another 25 units. In that scale 1pixel would equal 40 centimeters which I reckon would do for a passage sufficiently wide for the small but too narrow for the larger characters. The edges of such a map would be 600 meters in the landscape of the game. I do not think that it will be necessary to create a map in this scale for every corner of the Great Valley (that would otherwise be 625 maps!) but only for those section where there are tight spots like narrow paths, cliffs, causeways etc. For all parts of the Valley without such tight spots the 1 pixel = 2 meters scale should do.
