Painting the citadel: evening it out costs more than drawing it

The design was there. What was missing was painting it at the resolution you actually play at — the citadel is 4,915 × 3,276 px at 50 px per metre — and that is where the real work showed up.

What was wrong: not all of it was painted with the same care. Up close, crisp stretches sat next to smeared ones — the west half of the plaza was the clearest case — and at the distance you play from, that stands out: some areas have ground and others look like a smudge.

The second pass rebuilt the small detail without touching the composition. Original on the left, revision on the right, at full scale:

The shadows that cannot be painted

The painted shadows had to go, too. Day and night lighting is done in the engine, so a shadow drawn into the image stays put at noon and at midnight alike: the sun moves and the shadow does not, and the eye notices even when it cannot say what is wrong.

This one, on the water at the exit of the bridge arches, was the last to fall:

Then the one-off mistakes

Which are what eats the hours: a shield that appeared where it should not, a shed that lost a wooden roof detail when it was repainted, a riverbank whose grain came out too coarse, and an eastern building whose roof tiles changed size from one side of the roof to the other.

None of these is hard. The hard part is finding them, because it means going over the whole image at full scale knowing that any fault you miss is one a player will see.

What cost the most time was not drawing the citadel. It was evening it out: making the corner nobody looks at as careful as the cathedral façade.