Kevin Smith works for a GIS software company in real life, and evidently has some real talent with both GIS and image-editing software in general, as evidence by this absolutely sweet map of Britannia that he posted to the Ultima Dragons Google+ Community.

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Here’s his brief description of the piece:

Britannia. Built using QuantumGIS, GIMP, Fontforge , OpenJUMP , and some software I wrote myself in Java using the JTS library. I tried to represent it as it was between Ultimas 6 and 7 although the shape comes mostly from 4.

A more detailed description of the map’s development can be found here, although unregistered visitors to that forum aren’t able to see images.

The level of detail is beyond astounding, and I’ll direct your attention to e.g. the farmland that he has added surrounding many of the towns, and the keen transition to more tropical flora toward the southern reaches of the continent. This is, really, the sort of thing that should be hanging in a frame somewhere.

The First Age of Update: Sanctimonia downloaded the full-size map and made a few adjustments to it:

I converted it to RGB, added an alpha channel, created an alpha mask from the RGB channel, replaced the RGB channel with pure black, then duplicated the resulting layer to give more definition to the line art. Hope you like it.

And, indeed, the revised image is just a little bit crisper in its definition, and of course boasts a fully-transparent background. I have added it as a download, above, and to the newly-created project entry for this fine, fine map.