I won’t take up a lot of room here, but I have posted a technical discussion of JOSM, osmconvert, and “polygon format files” at the wiki:

http://opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/User:Luciano/Sandbox/Help:Polygon_files

Happy mapping.

Since I had the day off for the Lunar New Year holiday (Year of the Monkey), I decided to complete the creation of Commonia’s 1st level political divisions. Commonia now has 75 “constituent regions” - I conceptualize the country as having a kind of “assymetric federalism” in the style of the Russian Federation.

Since the main map doesn’t update often at low zooms, I made one of my “polygon overlay maps” so people can take a look:

http://opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/User:Luciano/Sandbox/Polygons/CO-adminlevel4

Since Commonia is a “blue” territory open to all, none of these choices are written in stone. If you don’t like something, you are free to change it. However, please don’t change things “just because” - try to have a well-thought-out reason, or some interest in the territory in question.

Hopefully these relations can be maintained despite newbies working the territory - everyone is invited to help out if you notice something amiss.

I made up almost none of the names. I would surf across the map and choose names from towns or other mapped objects placed by various users, and apply them to the regions. The borders in many areas are completely made up, however - and in several areas I added some major rivers to give some shape and reason territories.

Only in a few areas did I find substantial “legacy” boundaries to work with, but in those cases, I tried very hard to respect them.

Only in some blank areas did I make up names. I tried to give the country a wide cultural diversity. To commemorate the start of the “Year of the Monkey” I named a fairly empty southwestern state “Annosimia” - Latin for “Year of the Monkey.”

Happy mapping!

Can geofiction cure cancer? Probably not. But it makes surviving it more enjoyable, maybe.

Two years ago, on this day (Jan 31), I joined Opengeofiction. I had just finished a major cancer treatment a few months before. In surviving my cancer, I am thankful to five main groups of people:

• 1. My friends and family, in their many different countries - for supporting me emotionally
• 1. My colleagues, coworkers and my generous boss - for making it possible for me to undergo treatment without losing my job
• 1. The amazingly efficient Korean healthcare system and the kind doctors and staff at the National Cancer Center - world-class care, and cheap, too
• 1. My students - for keeping me intellectually and socially engaged and demonstrating the promise of humanity
• 1. OGF - for providing an escape from dull hours and discomfort, with its endless distraction in imaginary places

I’m posting this here because of number 5.

In June, 2013, I had been diagnosed with stage three cancer. I had undergone major surgery, a month-long hospitalization, and two months of radiation treatments. I was weak, I had lost 40 kg, and my chances of survival were still only 50%. I had returned to work only part-time, and was unable to be as mobile or as active as I had been before - I didn’t have the same stamina to go hiking every weekend. I had a lot of chronic pain and a lot of time to kill. I needed a new hobby.

OGF rescued me. In my teenage years I spent my time drawing many, many maps, all on paper, of imaginary cities, countries and planets. All sorts of worlds, from fantasy to sci fi to “parallel Earth” styles. I decided to try to “recover” one of these old maps in this new, digital environment.

… See full entry

Lately, I have seen a lot of people worrying about coastline edits “not showing up on the map.”

Both the “admin” account and my personal account see a few messages every day, lately, asking “where are my coastline edits!?”

So rather than trying to keep answering those messages, I will post a reminder here.

The “render” - the program that makes what you edit show up on the map - is divided into parts. The “coastline render” is a separate part from other parts. As a result, if you make an edit involving the coastline - for example, you build a new little seaside town, on some new islands - the result can be temporarily strange, if the main render and the coastline render run at different times. You will see your new island town, but sitting in the water, because the coastline hasn’t rendered yet.

Recently, the coastline render has been very slow. This is due to the large amount of work the coastline program has to do, and admin’s efforts to make the best use of limited server resources. As a result, the coastline update can take a long time - even several days. Once I waited a week for a coastline edit to show up on the main map.

Also, it can look strange, because each “zoom level” of the map might render at a different time. So you might see your new island at zoom 15, but not at zoom 14, etc., for a while. And it makes our continental “floods” (when someone breaks the coastline) weird (only flooded at some zoom levels, for example) and harder to fix (because the coastline render is delayed, so a “flood” might be the result of some mistake someone made many days ago).

All of this is nobody’s fault - it’s just the situation with the server, right now.

Please be patient.

… See full entry

Earlier today we had some down-time… I’m not sure why but it seems to have recovered.

Since I had planned on working on OGF during that time, I started messing around with my most recent downloaded backup file (dated 12/31).

There are some interesting utilities that can be used to manage OSM data offline, in order to get manageable data sets in OSM format (or other formats). The two tools I use all the time are osmconvert and osmfilter.

OSM format files can be edited in JOSM and uploaded later, but these utilities have other abilities too.

Out of curiosity, today, I decided to get some statistics on our current OGF map, and make comparisons with my country, Ardisphere (abbreviated FA). I made two OSM files - one was for the entire OGF planet and the other was using my FA polygon file (.poly) which gives me a .osm file limited to my country’s borders (roughly).

I found that the OGF planet file (uncompacted .osm) is currently about 4.05 GB, while the Ardisphere, alone, is 618MB.

“Wow,” I thought. That looks like the Ardisphere, a relatively tiny country (about the size of Uruguay) on the world map, accounts for 15% of OGF’s data volume. I guess I’ve drawn a lot of nodes! I’m nowhere close to finished, either.

As a point of comparison, OGF’s entire Western Hemisphere, where only vandals and admins dare map, is approximately 65MB.

As another point of comparison, the REAL WORLD .osm file is 46 GB, so our imaginary world has less than 10% of the data. Meanwhile, Uruguay’s .osm is 342MB, and Switzerland’s is 3.6GB. Hmm. Ardisphere has twice the data as its real-world counterpart, while tinier but well-mapped Switzerland is almost the size of the entire OGF planet.

Both of the files I made, OGF.osm and FA.osm, are much too large to edit in JOSM - my desktop computer will crash on .osm files larger than about 100MB. I have other polygon files of smaller areas for if I’m making an extract for editing.

… See full entry

I’m really bad at finishing things. I tend to map an area up to a certain level and then move on to some other project. Thus there is very little that I consider “complete” in my countries.

I surprised myself over the weekend by completing a major theme park in Palmeras Grises, DS, Ardisphere, to a very high level of detail. It’s sort of based on the US “Sea World” locations, but I made sure to make it different from those parks in layout and detail, too.

Anyway I’m quite pleased with it.

MundoMar!

Happy mapping.

no subject

I have created a first draft consolidated Geolympiad Games Bid page.

Now anyone can bid for any given games, winter or summer, in one place. We can “close” bidding and voting after some minimum number of bids and/or votes are received. I am tentatively recommending 2 minimum bids, and 20 minimum votes total, or 10 minimum votes for a single city.

Feedback and comments are welcome - either down below or on the new page’s Talk page. This is meant to be a community project, so other people’s ideas are welcome.

I have created a link to a bid for Tarott, 2008 because joschi81 mentioned he intended to do this. I will probably have my city Villa Constitución do a bid for the 1970s - that seems to fit the developmental arc of the city.

Keep in mind as we develop bids that the games will “rotate” to different continents and regions (to prevent a single region monopolizing the games), so as the tables and bids get “filled in” other possibilities will be constrained. Think about this as you decide when you want to date your city’s bid. For example, since Quentinsburgh, Tarephia, has won the 2016 bid, Tarephian cities should not bid for 2012 nor for 2020.

Después de diálogo con usuario Kalh79, he decidido crear una organización internacional de países de habla “castellanesa” (o sea, española). Cualquier país esté bienvenido a este grupo - visite la nueva página e inscríbese sin perjuicio. Sé que hay muchos hispanohablantes en OGF - ¡trabajemos juntos!

After discussion with user Kalh79, I have decided to create an international organization of “Castellanese-speaking” countries (that is to say, Spanish-speaking). Any country is welcome to join - you can visit the new page and sign up freely. I know there are a lot of Spanish speakers in OGF - let’s work together!

Happy mapping!