Hello everyone. Like the title says I have a few questions about the map and the community.

First off is there any “official” ressource like a wiki about the different countries and locations on the map?

If not is there any one designing a country that is either french, english or scandanavian that has an organised metropolitan area that I may possibly join?

Also other then User Diaries and Private Messages are there any other ways that community members communicate. Something like a mailling list or an irc channel?

Anyways thanks for reading again. Hope to see your work progress.

As you can see on the overview map, the country of Ísztianország is displayed in purple. This is meant to indicate the new category of “community territories”. Editing in those areas is open to everyone, but in a somewhat more restricted fashion than with the “blue” territories. The goal behind this is to achieve a more unified appearance of the territory with regards to language and culture for the sake of increased realism.

Note also that there’s still a user name displayed for Ísztianország - in this case joschi81 - just as with owned territories. That user however should not be regarded as the territory owner, but rather as an address for the first contact and probably some kind of moderator for the further development.

So the guidelines for taking part in the development of a community territory are as follows:

• Before you start editing, contact the territory’s moderator to discuss your plans. Maybe it’s even better to have this discussion in a comment thread on our diary page.
• don’t change existing structures without contacting their creators first
• discuss your planned creations with other users working in adjacent areas

(Of course, those are probably good practices for blue areas too, but here it’s official policy). Also those guidelines are kind of tentative, let’s just see how it works out.

Hello everyone, new here :) I’m quite enthousiast about this lovely project.

At the moment, to try my hand, I’m building a small coastal town named Calevin in Brunswick. I plan it to be a medieval european town with remains of walls.

Anybody is welcome to help :)

LeFaune/Johann

Hi all,

those of you who already “passed” their two-weeks testing phase and thus have the right to claim a territory are welcome to claim a part of Ísztianország (Estiansia) now. Please ask me via my inbox if you’re interested and I’ll give you some details.

Most important thing - and a challenge of course: the country is Hungarian speaking (and I’m not, actually). Is there any Hungarian speaking OGF member already who would help us with correcting some names or who would even like to participate?

One more important thing: It’s a Western Ulethan* country (which is like Europe on our planet). So: it’s a landscape with viallges and cities that have grown over many centuries. So no (e.g. US-like) grid-style mega-cities here. ;) (well, except if you want to have a part of your city in Barock style or in modern style… but that’s only a part of the respective city then)

Also: The motorway network of the country isn’t very large yet (but growing) and the railway network is quite huge (however, not very dense in rural areas).

*The continent is called “Uletha”

Looking forward to develop this country together with some interested members!

Best Joschi81

Hello Everyone I have shaped the coast and the highway around port Siji. I have also added a tower and made the lighthouse building. I hope to make port Siji a vibrant community.

Is there plan to name the AR900-country?

For all of you who are interested: Here’s the video of Thilo’s and my presentation at SotM-EU last Friday: Opengeofiction (Video of our talk at SotM-EU, June 13, 2014)

Next weekend (June 13-15) the SotM-EU (“State of the map - Europe”), the conference of the European Openstreetmap community, will be held in Karlsruhe, Germany.

The cool thing is, Johannes and I will be giving a talk about Opengeofiction on Friday June 13 at 11:00 a.m. local time (9:00 UTC):

http://sotm-eu.org/en/program

If everything works as planned, you can watch a livestream of our talk:

http://sotm-eu.org/en/streaming

(I guess there will also be recorded videos available afterwards, if you don’t have the time to watch it live.)

Is there a way to separate the the national boundary from the coastline? I wanted to clean up the boundaries in Orinoco to make it look like it has a 20 mile buffer instead of the mess I have now. I don’t want to flood anyone by making edits to the coastline.

http://opengeofiction.net/#map=11/33.5883/143.8100

I’ve sketched out some “forest” areas to propose a chain of mountains running across Gobrassanya. I think working out terrain early on is good way to establish patterns for future cities, roads and other infrastructure to develop realistically.

I also think it’s good to establish large areas of low density (in this case, mountains) because I think these maps are more realistic when they have a clear contrast between populated areas (lowlands, cities, coastlines, etc) and unpopulated areas (mountains, forests, deserts, etc).

(So for example, fewer cities and roads in the mountains, more cities and roads in the lowlands, just like in real life. In this scenario the proposed A50 and A70 corridors would probably be red highways, and the western part of the proposed A5 would not exist.)

In any case feel free to discuss here. Thanks!

isleño

In the case of a continent flooding, you’re all - especially the more experienced users - called upon to fix it. That’s a case where I consider it justified to make an edit in another user’s territory. It can be quite difficult however to find the exact location of the problem. To help with that, I created the following page which displays nodes where the coastline is broken in some way:

http://opengeofiction.net/util/coastline_info.html

(Click on a marker in that map to see more information about the related node.)

Explanation: see this article for a comprehensive description of the requirements for coastline data. It follows that any node in a coastline way must be either

• a member of exactly one such way, either as an interior point or as its combined start and end point (if the way is closed) or
• a member of exactly two ways, where it is the start point of one and the end point of the other

Nodes that do not meet this condition are displayed on the map. Obviously they don’t always cause a rendering problem, but in the case of a major flooding you will probably find the problematic location among them.

This is what I do: http://i.imgur.com/ny0ltfr.png

The left-hand window is my JOSM editor. The right-hand window is a similar area in the real world (viewed in OSM) and I’m making sure that both are at a similar zoom level.

In this case I’m creating FunLand Khaiwoon, using Hong Kong Disneyland as a model. By “model” I mean I’m trying to make sure that the buildings are roughly the same size, the parking lot is roughly the same size, the little car race track is roughly the same size, the theme park as a whole is roughly the same size, etc.

This seems to work pretty well for me. I’ve used the same technique for airports, seaports, industrial areas, etc.

Anyone have other tips and tricks they’d care to share?

isleño

EDIT: There is now a tool that does this much more easily —OGF scale helper!

Help!

Following the ‘fix’ for the inundated lands after the server migration, my ‘Great Freshwater Sea’ (a Lake Nyassa equivalent, forming 55% or so of my Eastern border) has simply disappeared!

Where is it? Can it be restored?

AGF

There is a very helpful tagging guide at the OpenStreetMap site which means I have been manually adding details and features to the map which are not shown in the sidebar. One particularly nice result of this is that I can now label mountains and hills which helps give a sense of topography to the landscape. Indeed, the entire layout of a country depends on the location of highlands and flatlands, since these dictate where watercourses run and so where cities are founded and how transport links will connect them.

Here are two images that will show you where your territory would be if it was on planet earth with the same geocoordinates as in Opengeofiction. These are screenshots from an early stage of the recent server migration when I had imported the map data but not yet replaced the shapefiles for coastline rendering. Just thought this might be interesting. (To see the full size, right click on the image and select “View Image” from the menu).

… See full entry

Its beautiful to see the updates within 5 minutes. It makes my editing go much smoother. I combined both North Pretany and the South Pretanic Kingdom into one megacountry called The Kingdom of Pretany. I am excited to get some new neighbors to link to and collaborate with. Feeling lonely to my south and east and my neighbor to the north is never home.

General impression ~ Description sounds brilliant, tx Thilo.

Should make things easier to use for me to use (I think/hope).

Some initial queries:-

1]. Almost all of the planet is currently shown ‘under water’ in the VIEW screen. There are just a few white ‘islands’ showing… Is this something that we - users - have to ‘fix’ ourselves, and if so, how do we do this?

2]. My offshore islands: Their outlines have all disappeared, leaving just their inter-state boundaries sitting in the ocean. How to ‘fix’, please?

3]. Text display size: My vision is imperfect and I find that the names for things on the map are a little too small for me to be able to see clearly. How can they be magnified say, 20-25%?

4]. I NEED to be able to see the settlement nodes/names at most map-representation magnifications, but the ‘smaller settlements’ all disappear as I zoom-out. How may I prevent this, as this is a very important factor for me? (Without having to mark them all up as ‘cities’!)

5]. I am SERIOUSLY struggling to think of a way to join my settlements with highways, etc. ~ because at the ‘Editing Magnifications’ I cannot tell where &/or in what exact direction the ‘next settlements lie. Is there a ‘trick’ to this, or some method of (say) just joining the settlement nodes with straight lines (that may later be individually edited)?

6]. I need to show physical geographic features like hills, mountains, moors, valleys, vales, etc. Please can you advise where I might find facilities to suit (this, I appreciate is simply a matter of my severe inexperience!).

7]. I’m entirely unsure about ‘LAYERS’ and their purposes/uses & best practice ~ please could you advise?

First time editing outside of Orinoco.

Changes in the editor.

Based on some new edits it appears Orinoco is located roughly in the same location as northern Japan.