Do you think it would be a good idea to create a Trans-Tarephia Highway?

Regarding the May challenge: I believe I failed - mostly due to lack of time. Nevertheless, I feel much happier with Tárrases now than I felt before - I have a better idea how it will finally look. You can read my updates at my “bliki.”

Others have made better progress. Comment below or at your own diary entry or wiki sandbox (as Sarepava or BMSOUZA have done) about your results for May.

Luciano’s Mapper’s Challenge #3 - June, 2016

My new challenge is a focus on administrative divisions.

In fact, I’ve already done a lot of work on this, but I’d like to take it further, toward completion.

So first, an intro-level discussion of the administrative divisions of countries.

Most countries have administrative divisions - of many different names, levels, and functions. The list is very long: states, provinces, counties, municipalities, etc.

It’s best to think in terms of levels:

• 1st level: states (US, Mexico), provinces (Canada, South Korea), federal subjects (Russia)…
• 2nd level: counties/parishes/boroughs (US), municipalities (Mexico), counties/cities (South Korea) …
• 3rd level: cities/townships (US), districts and townships (South Korea) …

In the OSM tagging system, these are indicated by the admin_level tag. Each country uses the admin_level tag differently, both in the real world and in OGF (see here for the way some people have deployed admin_level in OGF).

The best practice is to set up relations for each administrative division. I have set up almost 500 administrative divisions in Mahhal for 1st and 2nd levels, and almost that number in the Ardisphere.

1st level divisions are complete in both countries, and not likely to change much. 2nd level divisions are mostly complete, too. What I really want to focus on is the 3rd level divisions, especially in the Ardisphere.

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I realise I have been rather quiet about this since mooting it…various rehearsals, meetings, gigs and the small matter of my favourite band having an album launch party six miles away from me have ruled out most evenings this week. How do we all feel about next Sunday early afternoon BST?

Hello,

I have had mixed results trying to portray a planned highway extension. I have been using the “highway=proposed” tag and then a “proposed=highway” key, as instructed here.

At first I did not think this worked at all since the ways just disappear like untagged items, but then I switched to Histor’s style and it does in fact display a dashed highway like one would expect. (Histor I am coming around on using your style all the time, tip of the hat to you for its existence.) So this combination of tags does work, just not in the “standard” style that I assume most people use.

Does anyone have any tips or tricks to overcome this? Anyone have a better way to show planned construction?

Thanks in advance, r.s.

How do you add .jpeg or .png images to diary entries?

Also, how do yo get the map projection to automatically show up in the body of the diary entry?

Does this require any coding? I’m not too computer savvy.

The final product is not complete, but I’ve finally gotten far enough with the hand drawn fold-out version of the QUARTA QLine Metro Map to post to the wiki page. I’m pleasantly surprised. It actually looks realistic, to me at least. It also includes (while it’s hard to see it) major bus lines, trolley lines, the QCommute system, and major parks and neighborhoods. You can sort of look at it and imagine what the full map would look like based on the overview map.

Just as a reminder, this is what it used to look like when I first posted about it:

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Hi Geoficticians!

I hope everyone is having a great Northern-Hemisphere-Spring-Southern-Hemisphere-Fall.

Last year, I created our wikipedia-style Main Page for our wiki, with its “featured” sections. At first, I updated each of the featured sections every week, and later I transitioned to doing so once a month.

Recently, I have been neglecting this aspect of my work on OGF, and I think it is time to say I would like to focus on other projects and priorities in OGF.

So I am hoping we can find one or more volunteers to take over the curatorial responsibility for the four “featured” sections of the Main Page. You don’t need “admin” privileges on the wiki to do this job - I created the new Main Page before I joined the admin team.

The main things that are needed are:

• 1) A basic-level understanding of the concepts behind markup (i.e. HTML and wiki-markup)
• 2) A willingness to learn how to do the updates - your first update might take a few hours, since you’ll be learning the process.
• 3) A willingness to commit about an hour of your time for each subsequent update - if you update once a month, that’s one hour a month.
• 4) A willingness to try to be diverse, fair and objective in choosing materials to feature
• 5) A desire to contribute to the OGF community and make a great “gateway” for new visitors
• 6) In the event that we have more than one volunteer, you need to be willing to work well with each other (i.e. share responsibilities, etc.)

I have already created some very detailed documentation for how to update the “Featured Article” section. I will try to add documentation for the other sections when I have time, but I think it is less necessary, since all the “featured” sections follow the same pattern as the “Featured Article” section - so once you understand how to update the “Featured Article,” understanding how to do the other sections is fairly easy.

Here is the documentation for how to update the “Featured Article.”

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Hello all,

I wanted to get some people’s input on how I should go about tagging land use for Patriot City.

I have noticed that everyone seems to have a different approach when it comes to tagging landuse. For example, Luciano has very little tagging in his large city, Villa Constitucion. Whereas Leowezy tags a decent amount in his city of Ro.

Yuanls tags even more elaborately in his smaller city of Ellmouth.

My question is, how elaborate should I go when it comes to area tagging. For example, if I tag an entire neighborhood residential, there may be businesses in that area, and vice-versa for the downtown. I would also like to maintain a certain amount of uniformity with my tagging throughout the city.

Should I just tag the city center and key focal points as commercial and the rest of the city residential? Or go all the way down to the parcel level? (could take years)

Just wanted to get your input. Thank you!

With Dorchester National Park, I initially started tracing from a photo, and using the land use and geography attributes to add contrasting colors (park=green, forest=dark green, scrub=yellow green etc.) In the original photo, the mountains were barren, except for some glaciers (which I converted to lakes).

After a few weeks of tracing with the photo, I discovered a more original way to render mountain ranges other than just tracing from a photo, and also better than relying on imagination alone.

First, you will need the JOSM editor with the PicLayer plug-in installed.

Next, cut a long sheet of tin foil (about 2-3 times longer than the width) and crumple it up. Carefully, unwrap it and flatten it out. Now you can shape it according to your needs: you can flatten some valleys or raise some high peaks, as you like.

Once you’re finished, take a photo of your new mountain range and upload it to your computer. Then, open JOSM. Next, open OGF in the location where you want to put your mountains. Click the ‘download’ button in JOSM. Copy and paste the OGF coordinates in the URL field (for those new to JOSM, make sure opengeofiction is your default site, not openstreetmap)

Next, click ‘Imagery’, then ‘New picture layer from file’. From here, you can select your mountain image. This opens the mountain image as a background layer to OGF. Click on ‘Windows’, then ‘Layers’. Here, you can edit the mountain image layer (you may need to resize, rotate, or adjust the transparency) or go straight to tracing by clicking ‘Data Layer 1’.

Scaling the mountains accurately might be tricky. Maybe there are some more experienced mappers here who can advise on the average size of mountains.

Hopefully, this will be helpful for those who would like to render mountains. One caveat is that this is VERY labor intensive, so you might want to stick to rendering a small area you think will be of particular interest, as opposed to a 100-mile-long range.

Just thought I’d give a bit of an update on what I’m working on in Dunwic. I’ve been working on improving the city that I’d mapped too quickly and without enough detail. I’m getting close to having completed the entire city centre. I have also been changing names from Ingerish to Myrcian (based on Old English).

Here are some areas I’ve recently completed and am quite proud of:

Kirkcoleg Myrcia

Map

The city’s university, built in the 1930s in a collegiate style by a garden city architect. It’s still not 100% finished but it’s something I keep going back to and adding detail and more buildings.

Forshæig / Vesterburh

Map

I began these neighbourhoods last week when I got back from being in the Netherlands. I got rid of the neighbourhoods that were here and started from scratch building canals and creating an antiques shopping area.

Nórdburh

Map

Another area I’ve recently re-built from scratch. It’s an 18th century street plan inspired by Sir Christopher Wren. It includes the neo-classical cathedral (St Anselm Milkirk) and the cliff railway which leads down to the river.

Hýþ Terminal

Map

This area used to be a fairly clumsy harbour that was one of the first things I mapped. I got rid of all that and re-designed it to be more realistic. I think the retail park, even though it’s quite a simple thing, makes it look particularly realistic.

Feedback always welcome!

I just started working on OGF a couple of months ago and have been working mostly in the initial planning stage of laying out my country Unesia, so I don’t really have much mapped out in yet, though I have started bits and pieces, like a city park in Dexter-Overton, a tourist spot in Dorchester National Park, and a small city in Commonia (Somerset).

Over the past 25 years, I’ve been designing fantasy cityscapes and maps, and as a result, I’ve amassed a lot of original artwork.

Today, I was working feverishly compiling my artwork and images in preparation for my wiki pages and, in the process of doing so, pushed my computer to it’s limits.

In the past seven years my Toshiba Qosmio has seen numerous upgrades, replaced motherboards, and even survived a lightning strike, but resizing a few hundred .jpegs finally caused it to go haywire.

It’s still working (as you can see), but somehow it thinks I want to delete every file I open (NOT a good mind reader :)). So far, deleting the ‘delete’ app from the task manager is working, but I don’t know how long I can make that a routine.

Hopefully, I can afford to buy a new computer in a few months, but until then every day this one still works is a blessing.

Hi everyone!

I’m new here and have been editing for about a week and a half, mainly working on the town Goitanwee in Gobrassanya. For my entire life, I’ve been into creating maps of fictional cities on paper and I have one that I’ve been working on for almost ten years. I’ve even created a whole region around that city that is approximately the size of a US state or two. The region looks like this:

I really am excited to have found OGF and have long wished to have had something like this! It’s going to be great to tie all my towns and cities together. But, I didn’t really find any available green territory that I thought really would fit my city and region. What I found that would work best is one of the territories in the western hemisphere, KA031, but all those territories are currently unavailable.

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Hello

I just watched a video on youtube that gave me an idea. We could have a wiki page for alternate countries and scenarios. I already have a few ideas. If we get enough, I’ll make a sandbox page on the wiki to record them. I guess they have to be at least plausible though, to stick with the verisimilitude policy, although I could also create a page for less realistic alternatives.

Let me know what you think!

Yuanls

Hello mappers,

A short post in favor of the people who haven’t seen it on the recents page yet. In the spirit of the Premier Formula conversation a few days ago, I’ve done some work on more templates to extend information.

There is the Navbox 2016 Premier Formula season, with important information already on the 2016 Premier Formula page. Then there is Infobox 1PF race for details about Grands Prix, and a Navbox Premier Formula seasons.

Feel free to use it on your Premier Formula related pages and if something is missing, fill it in or let me know!

-PortCal

Hey there, I’d like to use this post to present to you my very first “finished”* area in Kojo :D

(*“Finished”, as in, there are still tons of options for more details to be added, the wiki article to be completed etc. But overall the city is mapped to the maximum level of detail that I would consider feasible for my mapping style to be applied to the very last corner of the map)

The wiki article about Rō is not very elaborate yet, and right now I lack inspiration to write the history part for example. I will probably get to it in the future. However some other important aspects are written on the wiki page; I always have a hard time estimating how many users actually read the wiki articles about countries that are not their own, for my part I do so very frequently. Do you find it interesting to read through other people’s wiki pages, or do you do so rather rarely?

The tram and street network is finished, and I would appreciate some feedback on that as well. Another thing that I would appreciate some feedback on is the zoning, and just the mapping style in general. I hope you like Rō and enjoy browsing through the map a bit. Any thoughts and comments are welcome :)

Cheers, Leo

Just a small, but important question: Does the OGF earth still rotate in the same direction? I should right? I mean that would only unnecessarily complicate everything. So the sun rises in the east and goes down in the west? Thanks for answers

Please write the name for Montran in the language of your country in the List of country names in various languages. Or write it in the comment.

Montran in the native language means “plains below mountains”. You can consider it if you want.

Thank you!

A couple of weeks have passed since the last entry, so here’s what I have been working on:

A large housing estate in a poorer area, Caminharju, with tower blocks and communal apartments as well as two schools. There is a medical centre and some small shops in the estate, appropriate for the economic makeup of the area: http://opengeofiction.net/#map=16/52.1047/111.0315

Beginning of the industrial area in the south-west corner. This includes some railways spurs and disused railways, a power station and works, and some terraced houses for workers (a British touch): http://opengeofiction.net/#map=16/52.0915/111.0038

Just a little to the north is a redeveloped area which has some posh apartment blocks and a Chogué temple for immigrants from the Ardisphere (cheers Luciano): http://opengeofiction.net/#map=17/52.09698/111.00393

The state hospital: http://opengeofiction.net/#map=17/52.09750/111.02437

Large mainline traincare facility at the Idaajaam: http://opengeofiction.net/#map=17/52.12173/111.04443

The wealthy suburb of Lossepark (Castle Park) which is built on the ridge (‘harju’) by the river, every house with a big garden, and a posh school; http://opengeofiction.net/#map=17/52.11620/110.98428. Building the relief road through here was very controversial and noise barriers and trees have been planted to hide it.

Palenkaplats, which is the main nightlife area and traditionally home to the LGBTQIA+ community, with several gay and student bars. Rents are going up as the area becomes more gentrified. http://opengeofiction.net/#map=17/52.11606/111.00591

Gradually adding house numbers and shop types to Saar island.

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Hello everyone,

In real life, I watch the Formula One a lot. A few times ago I noticed that there also is a kind of Formula One chamionship in OGF, the Premier Formula. I would like to do more things with it. I would like it if someone maybe can help me. I need Grand Prix’s, driver’s, teams and maybe even more! So, do you want to organise a Grand Prix , do you want a team from your country (we already have those on this page, but we need 3 more), do you want a driver from your country in the competition or maybe you know something other, please help me!

Greetings Niels20020

Hello! I’ve just gotten started with OGF about a week ago, and it looks great so far. Making small roads and buildings with the iD Editor was a lot of fun. I do have one question, though…

This guide recommends to start by making large-scale mountains and rivers. However, in iD, I can only make edits while zoomed in very close. This seems to make large features somewhat difficult; how can I work around this? I’ve tried JOSM, and it has a similar problem, as you can only download a very small slice of land.

Also, I’ve claimed a country (AN152f) but can’t seem to figure out how to rename it. None of the administrative borders are selectable in iD - they just won’t load at all. I’m sure it’s something simple that I’m missing…

Thank you!