The Base8 Modular Landscaping Standard
Part 2: Coordinating a Base8 display
To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t want to be the planner of a Base8 display, the standard is very open ended and would take an extreme level of coordination to pull off. But that’s assuming you don’t have access to something like NWMap.
NWMap
NWMap was a tool written by Jason Harris for the game Neverwinter
Nights, a game for PC that shipped with its own toolset for creating,
among other things, modular landscapes. NWMap was written by fans for
fans that wanted to plan out their maps before the game was released,
though once the game was released it became useless and has since been
released into the public domain. I was one of the original artists for
NWMap, and I have since modified it to work as a planning tool for
Base8 landscapes.
Bear in mind that the program was never really
finished, and many of the features I’ve made use of weren’t really
fully implemented so I’ve had to come up with a few not-so-intuitive
workarounds, but the thing should reduce the workload of planning a
display exponentially. If any coders would like to take a crack at
fixing some of these workarounds please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Using NWMap
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When you start the program you will get an “access violation” error message. Ignore this and it should load up just fine.
You will find yourself presented with a blank canvas of green
baseplates, broken up in a grid of 8x8 stud divisions (8cres). The grid
is 32x32 8cres, which is the same as 8 32x32 stud baseplates by 8
32x32s, roughly 6’8” by 6’8” (a 32x32 baseplate is 10”x10”).
To the right is your palette. The first tab on the palette is the base
layer. To lay down different bases click the tiles in the palette and
paint down on the canvas. If you use the tiles in the first column
NWMap automatically changes the 8 squares around where you click to be
“transition zones” between base layers. The code for this is very iffy
and usually causes more damage than help, but it’s good for painting
oceans and rivers. Use the fifth column to paint 8cres normally with
hard edges.
You
can also select the other tiles if you need to clean up edges. Rotate
the tile you currently have selected using the arrows in the top right
corner of the canvas.
The next tab in the palette (“Layer 1”) contains the other edge modules used in Base8 and a few useful extras. 
The
important thing about this tab is the buttons on the left. The first
three buttons will paint roads, walls, or streams in a sort of
“snakelike” mode, hold down the mouse button and the tiles will
automatically curve to follow your brush and join correctly at
junctions. The next five buttons are “group modes.” You can hold down
the mouse and paint rectangles which will fill in with the appropriate
tiles correctly oriented. Unfortunately no code is set up for doing L
shapes so you will have to draw two rectangles and connect the`m
manually with the individual tiles.
In order to make an L shape you will have to draw in the corners yourself.
The next two tabs are for overlaying more useful information onto your display.
The white arrows are used to override the default heights of 3 and 7
bricks that cliffs and hills have marked on them, or to mark out height
variations in other areas. They start at 1 and go left to right to 30.
Just choose your height and click on an existing hill or cliff, using
the arrows to rotate accordingly.
Use the arrows on the Layer 2 tab to change height denotations
The
second thing to note is the flags and colored borders. These are meant
to be used to mark out each contributor’s plot in the display, or any
other borders you need to denote. The idea came from the MOC flags used
at Brickfest in 2004-05, and even though there are only 5 flag colors
they can be used the same way. The 
flags
on layer 2 are the lower flags and the flags on layer 3 are the upper.
NWMap is supposed to support different buttons on each layer (as well
as support for 16 buttons instead of 8) but this is a feature that was
never really finished so you need workarounds to make it work. Go to
Layer 1 (second tab) and select one of the lower five group mode
buttons (note they have flags on them). Then, without clicking anywhere
else, change to Layer 2 (third tab). Now draw a rectangle on the canvas
and it will use the tiles in Layer 2 to create an outline filled with
flags. To take it a step further go back to Layer 1 and select a
different color, then switch to Layer 3 and draw a rectangle directly
over the previous one. It will add that color flag to the 
existing ones and make the border 
striped
in the two colors you’ve chosen. The different combinations allow you
to denote 30 different contributors on one canvas.
Lastly you will
find tiles you can use for battle lines, in the event you’re going to
have a battle in your display. Contributors can set up figures in
fighting stances according to the lines and have a battle already in
progress between their modules when they arrive.
Extras
There are a few things included in the NWMap palettes, such as farms, castles, and buildings, that are not exactly necessary for the standard since these should usually be left in the hands of the contributor. They are included merely to give the coordinator a slightly better idea of how the overall layout of the display will come together. Another use is if your contributors have pre-existing modules and MOCs they would like to use in the display they can draw them in NWMap themselves and then send you the .nwm file or screenshots so you can see the footprint of their modules and plan around them accordingly.