Custom Maps
Hello everyone, I am the developer of 2024 Christmas, The Dark King and The Dalek Trail mods, and this is a brief guide I have written up after my experience with Jet’s amazing new mod-making tool, Open-Source Election Game (OSEG.) Without further ado, here is my advice, tips and suggestions for how you should go about making custom maps on OSEG!
Making custom maps is actually really quite easy. First, you’ll have to go to the map tab on OSEG:
Now, all you have to do is first delete everything from “<svg” – this is the default map already loaded in, and we are going to insert another SVG document to act as our own custom map.
So, we have to find an SVG map of what we want to use first! What I’ve come to find out is that the website MapChart is probably the best possible source for any custom maps you may want to make. It has a rich selection of individual nations, various subdivisions, global maps, etc. and most importantly, it comes with proper names for each subdivision so you won’t have to edit in your own names which can be annoying.
Plus, on MapChart you can edit the thickness and colour of borders; both of which will be retained when copying the necessary data over to OSEG! But anyway, once you open up MapChart and choose which map you want, you scroll down to this part:
Click on ‘Download Options’, choose SVG and then click ‘Download Map’.
Next, go to the file you have downloaded, right click, and open it with a text editor like Notepad – this might sound weird but that’s how SVG documents work.
Then we have to do a few things to clean up our MapChart SVG file, because in its current form, it will include a few random shapes and a tag that says ‘created with mapchart.net’. So after you open the file in a text editor, search up all instances of “pattern0”, “pattern1”, “pattern2”, “pattern3”, “pattern4” and "patern5” – do this via ‘Control + F’.
It will look something like this, and you have to delete the entire highlighted region from to :
Next, search for ‘mapchart.net’ and you should find this:
Delete ‘Created with mapchart.net’.
All that’s left to do is do ‘Control + A’ and copy the entire SVG file from the text editor over to OSEG!
One last thing after that is to scroll down in OSEG, click ‘Add States’ and ‘Delete Missing States’ so your new map loads fully into OSEG. Now, something else you should be aware of and you might’ve thought about already, is the fact that if you want; for example, a map of just Kazakhstan and let’s say MapChart doesn’t have a map of just Kazakhstan; but it DOES have a global map, you can download that and all you have to do is delete all the paths that are not Kazakhstan from the text file. This is how I created my custom map in the Dark King – I got rid of most states on Africa and kept only a select few to make up my own custom map. 😊
Remember that you don’t have to use MapChart – any SVG map file you find online should work. MapChart is my recommendation however because it’s free for non-commercial use and has pretty much any map you could possibly want in one place.