Old World Mapmaker

This is an unofficial XML generator that converts 3 RGB bitmaps to a map for the game Old World by Mohawk Games. I thought it was amazing the maps were all just in plain XML and wanted a lighter-weight way to make maps outside of the in-game editor, so I made this. The main use-case for this is to make a map first as a bitmap in an image editor like GIMP or Photoshop, then use this to transform your layers into XML.

Installation

This has been rolled into a python package and CLI application. Distribution on PyPI is planned but I would like to get it more thoroughly tested before that. For now you can either build from source or install from the current wheel in the distributions pane. You can install to your user python or system-wide, but running inside a virtual environment as a best practice.

From wherever you installed the wheel to, and with the virtual environment activated if you went that route:

pip install owmap-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl

After that you should be able to use the cli application or the genmap library in a python script. To set up a development environment I suggest using uv. After cloning the repository sync with the all dependency groups:

uv sync --all-groups

I couldn't get uv run pytest to work. For some reason that uses the default python interpreter instead of your virtual environment. This does work though:

uv run python -m pytest /tests

I have also created an up-to-date requirements.txt if that's what you're used to. As a reminder:

1. from the repositories root directory after cloning: python -m venv .venv
2. source .venv/bin/activate
3. pip install -r requirements.txt

Or on windows using powershell

1. from the repositories root directory after cloning: python -m venv .venv
2. source .venv/Scripts/Activate.ps1
3. pip install -r requirements.txt

CLI Basic usage

owmap [-h] [--mapname MAPNAME] [--terrainmap TERRAINMAP]
             [--heightmap HEIGHTMAP] [--vegmap VEGMAP]
             [maps ...]

At its most basic, the cli tool can take 3 positional arguments like so:

owmap [heightmap] [terrainmap] [vegmap]

Each of these maps represents a different layer of Old World's tile system. All of these maps are required to build a proper world. The tool can also be run with flags instead of positional arguments, for example:

owmap --terrainmap docs/terrain_ex.png --heightmap docs/height_ex.png --vegmap docs/veg_ex.png --mapname docs/donut.xml

or more succinctly:

owmap -t docs/terrain_ex.png -e docs/height_ex.png -v docs/veg_ex.png -o docs/donut.xml

The order doesn't matter for flags.

Usage with Image Editor

The main advantage of this tool is that it allows you to use your image-editor of choice to create maps for the game. If you want to see an example of this sort of setup, I have written a guide demonstrating a workflow with GIMP. While making maps from scratch isn't a whole lot more efficient than drawing in the ingame editor, you can use this tool to make maps using any images from online as a template such as those you were once able to get from the DEMIS World Map Server. (Which you can now find on the Wikimedia commons here