This is an appendix to my advanced Marathon Aleph One mapmaking guide. To learn basic mapmaking principles, you should start with my beginners’ guide.
Please contact me if you notice any errors or omissions.
For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll take the term ‘circle’ to mean ‘regular polygon with sufficiently many sides to look circular’. Aleph One is not actually capable of curves.
There are a few ways to construct circles in Weland. The simplest is probably to use shift+alt and draw points of equal length out from a central area. This will give you a regular 16-sided polygon, and for many cases, this is all you’ll need. However, in many cases, you may want more points. There are a few options here. There’s a circle plugin, which is fine if you’re OK doing a bit of math. (To get this to load on Windows, you may need to go to ‘Properties’ and select ‘Unblock’ next to ‘Security’. Obviously, don’t make a habit of doing this with just any software downloaded from the Internet unless you trust the authors.) Another option that doesn’t require a plugin (but still requires a bit of math) is the custom grid, this little icon you may not have bothered to try out before:
When you click it, it brings up some sliders that may at first look intimidating. (I’ve resized parts of this image to make its contents legible, but it’s otherwise untouched.)
For our ‘circle’, Origin will match its center and Scale will match its radius (at its vertices, anyhow). Rotation will vary, as we’ll see. I’ll demonstrate how to draw a 24-sided circle. We’ll leave Origin as 0, 0. We’ll start Rotation from 0°. For Scale, we’ll use the seemingly random number 3.831. Press 4 on the keyboard to get the grid to show at 1x size, then draw points out from (0, 0) in all four cardinal directions. We should have something like:
Protip: If you’re having trouble finding (0, 0), you can rotate the grid forward and backward (it always rotates around the center point); or edit one point by double-clicking it; or start from 15° and work back around to 0°. (Again, I don’t recommend using a Rotation of 90°; it’s not quite accurate.)
From here, we must rotate the grid by regular increments (this might be the trickiest part). 360° (the span of a circle) divided by 24 points (the number of vertices we’re using) gives us 15° increments, so our next angle is 15°. Set Rotation to 15° and draw lines out from the center. Rotating by another 15° gives us 30°, then 45°, then 60°, then 75°. (We could do this with fewer rotations, but we’ll save that for later.) All these steps are shown below.
We now have our circle’s points. Our next step is to draw our lines. It’ll probably help to disable the grid or to reduce the grid size (i.e., press 1 on the keyboard).
The next task is to fill the circle (assuming we wish to do that). It’s an inefficient allocation of map indices to fill all 24 triangles when we can use more sides per polygon; here, we can divide our circle into quadrants to get eight sides per polygon, which is perfect.
Now, some notes:
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These radii and rotations will create regular polygons with sides of 1 WU in length. (As pointless as including a triangle may seem, this is a fast way to get an equilateral triangle centered around a desired point.) Italic numbers are divisible by 8 (i.e, you can use Shift+Alt with 45° angles); bold numbers, by 16 (22.5° angles). 1 WU = 1,024 Internal Units; these are included for the circle plugin. It produces slightly different results, so they differ slightly.
(Click a category in the table header to sort by that category. Click it again to reverse the sort direction.)
# Sides | WU Radius | IU Radius | Rotation |
3 | 0.578 | 591.3 | 120.0° |
5 | 0.852 | 871 | 072.0° |
6 | 1.000 | 1024 | 060.0° |
7 | 1.153 | 1180 | 051.42857142…° |
8 | 1.306 | 1338 | 045.0° |
10 | 1.618 | 1657 | 036.0° |
12 | 1.934 | 1978 | 030.0° |
14 | 2.247 | 2301 | 025.71428571…° |
16 | 2.563 | 2624 | 022.5° |
18 | 2.880 | 2948 | 020.0° |
20 | 3.197 | 3272 | 018.0° |
24 | 3.831 | 3922 | 015.0° |
28 | 4.467 | 4574 | 012.85714285…° |
32 | 5.102 | 5224 | 011.25° |
36 | 5.735 | 5873 | 010.0° |
40 | 6.372 | 6525 | 009.0° |
42 | 6.690 | 6851 | 008.57142857…° |
44 | 7.008 | 7176 | 008.1818…° |
48 | 7.647 | 7830 | 007.5° |
52 | 8.283 (use 4.142) | 8482 | 006.92307692…° |
56 | 8.918 (use 4.459) | 9130 | 006.42857142…° |
60 | 9.558 (use 4.779) | 9780 | 006.0° |
64 | 10.190 (use 5.095) | 10435 | 005.625° |
72 | 11.468 (use 5.734) | 11740 | 005.0° |
Back to top · Mapmaking (basic) · Mapmaking (advanced) · Contact me · Website index
Back to top · Mapmaking (basic) · Mapmaking (advanced) · Contact me · Website index