Just discovered another wild mapping approach in my country. I love the totally unrealistic alignment to vanishing points.

Working on the skerry coast around Frjalshöfn, it just happened that I imported 680.000 nodes into JOSM, spreading on a total edge length of about 4.500 km. This results in 150 nodes per kilometer, which means, one edge is 6 metres long on average. Don’t worry, I deleted everything. ;-) (Just for explanation: of course, I didn’t draw this by hand. I used the “how to create realistic forsest coverage” method from the wiki and then fractalized the shapes).

For an edgy coast line like a skerry coast, what node distance would be adequate? 20 metres? 50 metres?

Just a small question. Can I, either out of JOSM or out of OGF directly (or any other way), export map data as svg file? So far, I didn’t find a solution.

As Nordurland is quite vast and many parts of the country are unvisited by me for long times, I quite regularly find guerrilla mappings from new OFG members. Most of them are useless, some of them are really funny (but not useful in any way), but some very few stand out. This city for example. I’ve decided to keep it (even if I will rename it to a more Icelandic sounding name) as it is a quite complete, decent sketch of a city.

Did you ever stumbled upon guerrilla mappings that you found worthy enough to assimilate?

Hey everybody,

during the last weeks, I finally decided to touch a very hot potato which bothers me for at least two years: the Frjalshöfn area.

The Frjalshöfn area was one of my early mapping projects in terms of landscaping. At the very beginning of the OGF history, Thilo wrote a diary entry where he encouraged us mappers to shape their countries individually and creatively. He also linked some interesting topographical spots. The Stockholm area was within these links. And I wanted to let Frjalshöfn be like Stockholm.

In my opinion, I failed. This became more than clear to me when I visited Stockholm last year. And even worse, The Frjalshöfn area in itself is totally unrealistic. Where should the water for this specific landforming come from? In the hinterland, I imagined a mountainous landscape, however, the distance to Grænnshöfn is only approx. 75 kilometers. There is no room for the forming of large rivers with that amount of sedimentation. I was aware of that problem quite early, but I mapped on, adding more and more infrastructure to the unfinishedd geography, deciding to solve the problem of verisimilitude at a later time.

… See full entry

Hi!

As I’m working on the history of Nordurland, I wondered about some assumptions I’ve made about the period of the totalitarian dictatorship which the country went through. I imagined that Nordurland used the most possible amount of its GDP for military purposes - so much that it was close to financial breakdown after 35 years, with a poor and undereducated population, strictly monitored by the security service.

Now I would like to ask for your opinion: how much would this be for a nation that big, quite rich in resources (oil, coal, uranium), probably around 20’000’000 to 50’000’000 people, with ridicculously large military forces. I assumed around 50% GDP. But could it be more? Or is this even too much?

Hi there!

Because I was uncertain of some renderings, especially of the wetland subtag, which isn’t further explained on the OSM map features page, I’ve decided to use some empty space in Nor∂urland to create a rendering test area. I will keep it there as long as I don’t use this area (and then I will move it elsewhere), so if you are interested, take a look at:

https://opengeofiction.net/#map=11/71.5514/35.4618

Hi there!

After reducing the number of nodes of the islands I’m trying to upload, I have a better feeling that it goes well this time. However, when uploading, JOSM takes literally hours to upload my data, or, to be more precise, the “Postprocessing uploaded data …” step takes hours. For 1.000 objects, it takes about 20 minutes easily. For 5000+ objects, it takes two or more hours. I’m sure this wasn’t the case when I did some other uploads before my island project. Did anybody of you experience the same during the last days? Or is there something I can do to optimize my upload data?

Greetings, Markus

Hi there!

Since a week, I try to upload a large group of islands which I created by tracing decomposing, fractalizing and recomposing a bitmap image in Inscape. First, JOSM was collapsing under the sheer number of nodes. I figured out which fractalizing factor to choose and after a lot of nights with useless data imports and hangups, I managed to get the data into JOSM. Now, I’m finally ready to upload. However, I have many polygons with more than 2000 points. It takes a lot of time to split all of them into uploadable chunks, especially when JOSM is quite slow. Does anybody of you know a way which allows to auto-split polygons or lines into chunks with X nodes? Merkaartor would also work, I have both.

Greetings, Markus

While writing this, I’m uploading a “nuke changeset” which will erase my capital city Markvað almost completely. If you ever visited Markvað, you probably will know why. The city was quite… “edgy”. The reason for this might be interesting, so I’m telling you the history of Markvað and also a short story of my mapping life before I came to OGF.

There is a railway simulation program around, called BAHN (which is just the german word for railroad). It’s not a “typical” railroad simulation - no 3D and also no cockpit simulation. Just plain 2D. You can create quite large networks with it and simulate complex train operations. It’s like a model railroad, however, you can have a model railroad in the size of an entire country. I used to play that game since I was 7 years old (it was 1993), in fact, it was my first computer game. Since then, BAHN evolved quite heavily. Well, I don’t want to make any advertising for this game, so let’s move on.

I had designed a large city in that simulation. And this city became Markvað when I started with OGF. The one more thing you need to know about BAHN is that you can only build tracks in 90 and 45 degrees (and, in the meantime, also 22,5 degrees). And this is the reason why Markvað used to be so rectangular.

In those BAHN days, Markvað was built with the goal in mind to maximize the public transport network to a phantastic density. When I imported the city to OGF, there were about 40+ Metro lines and a very dense tram network (which didn’t make it into OGF, I planned to insert it later). I guess, the new Markvað won’t have so many lines. However, I copied my “maximize the public transport network” dogma to Norðurland (as you can read in the wiki article about the country). So there will be still an almost unrealistic PT density in Markvað. However, I will design it in a way that COULD be real in a country which enforces its citizens to use public transport a lot.

… See full entry

Hi there,

Due to some OSM research, it just became clear to me that I possibly overused footways a lot in my cities…

See here or here.

I extensively use footways as “real” footways. However, It seems that in the OSM commuity, this is really uncommon. Footways seem only to be used if they are not situated directly alongside a road.

What do you think? Is my way of using footways totally wrong and I should delete them? Or is this usage tolerable?

Greetings, Markus

Hi everybody!

There’s not much news from my side currently. However, I wanted to send a sign of life that Norðurland, Liboria and Yleväkivet still aren’t abandoned and vacant.

However, I’m still quite disappointed that the User Diaries still seem to be the Nr. 1 location to get and drop information (at least, nothing else seems to be promoted on the site). For non-permanent-active members, this is - still - a massive pain… There is no thematic ordering, no way to scroll back quickly or to get back to a certain topic… For a community like this, a forum woild be a good place, albeit quite “antiqe” nowadays… I didn’t know how the chat/forum dispute at the beginning of the year was solved finally, but at a quick glance, nothing seems to have changed in the last half year.

Concerning my plans for the rest of the year, I started to (re)map parts of the region north-east of Frjálshöfn, including a new airport under construction which will replace both the international and national airports in Frálshöfn city. Currently, I’m also designing road signs for Norðurland. My main focus will be on the small country with the unspeakable name between Norðurland and Slavonia. I want to finish something here in OGF and Norðurland is too big to get this success in the next 5 to 10 years… ;-)

Greetings from Austria, Markus

Hi there!

Due to the fact that I’m on the road and only have my “hacked” armv7h Chromebook with Arch Linux with me, I came to use Merkaartor a little bit because the JRE became horribly slow on the Chromebook these days and JOSM is almost unusable. I quite like Merkaartor. It’s much more simpler and less featured than JOSM, however, it has the really useful feature of building parallel lines in one step (a.k.a. two lane roads).

However, the URL’s from the FAQ to display the map layers in JOSM don’t work for Merkaartor. Does anybody else work with Merkaartor and/or have an Idea of how to display the OGF map layers in it?

Greetings, Markus

Hi out there, fellow map-o-holics!

it’s been a pretty short year, and many of you brought forward their OGF countries a lot in those 365 days. Me not, unfortunately. I was inactive for at least 75% of the year and Norðurland still is a quite empty country. This country is so freakin’ huge (well, I knew this in the first place…), I guess it will take years to fill it up with life to a satisfying amount. And the more I work with OGF and the more I come to the details, the more I recognize how hard I struggle with those details.

However, I was more active in the last quarter of the year. And for 2017, I hope that I will spend more hours here with you than last year. I admire your creativity - lots of ambitious projects on the map and beside. So beautiful to see such an active, friendly, thriving and creative commutinty evolve! We have a real nice project here (If you didn’t recognized so far ;-) ).

During the last month, I mostly fixed errors from very early edits (still way more to fix here) and refined things that were roughly sketched in the first place. I finally started do work on Norðurland’s still very edgy coastline with the help of a graphics tablet, GIMP and Inkscape. Things move on slowly, but they move.

At the moment, I follow 2 larger projects:

• Coast refinement in north-eastern Norðurland, with many fjords, islands and lakes

• Since today, Norðurland is a little bit smaller, because there is a new citizen in town: the country with the ineffable name of Ruhtinaskunta Yleväkivet (the principality of Yleväkivet) lies between Norðurland and Slavonia. The spoken language is Vinnic. This language is the remains of an older, mostly dead or further evolved language family that was spoken around the Vinn sea. Vinnic is based on - surprise - Finnish.

… See full entry

Hi there,

on Facebook, I’m following a group called Map Porn. They share Posts about maps and things about maps of any kind. Take a look:

https://www.facebook.com/mapporn/?fref=ts

Maybe we could contact the admin team and ask if they would like to feature OGF on their page. What do you think, is this kind of “active marketing” useful?

Greetings, Markus

Hi!

I have a question especially to the admin team. My edits north of the polar circle take unusually long to be seen on the map during the last days and were only partly completed (the rendering process seemed to stop an a certain line which randomly(?) matches with the northern polar circle). Currently, it took more than one day even on the higher zoom levels until the content shows up, and somehow, on one zoom level, the map wasn’t updated for three days. And some edits around the Frederikshöfn area show up only partly on different map styles and only different zoom levels, too. I’ve never experienced that kind of weird rendering behaviour. Were/are there any rendering problems? And in general, what are the rendering intervals for the map?

Greetings, Markus

Hello there, fellow mappers!

I’ve started the first major approach to shape the coastline of north-eastern Norðurland. It’s not that easy, because I have a vast fjord scape in mind. I hinted that in one of my early mapping sessions with that “saber-tooth shape” of the coastline. Now, I finally want to map the whole thing out.

But there’s a problem: the details. When you take some minutes to closely inspect this (not so) random snippet of the norwegian coastline:

osm.org/#map=12/58.9968/10.0690

you’ll see that there are dozens of hundreds of islands, all in a very rough shape. A realistic rocky fjord coastline is suchlike rutted that it is almost impossible to map it out completely in this century, eypecially on such a length. What you see in the linked map is a coastline of ca. 30 km while the coastline which I intend to “fjordize” (from Frederikshöfn northwards, measured straight, without those cuts) is 3000 km - just mainland, not the huge islands… This means millons of small isles and thousands of narrow and wide cuts, fjords and lots of frustration…

… See full entry

Hi there!

During the last days, I was the victim of several “rookie attacks”, there were unwanted modifications in my country from several new editors (i think you all experienced this kind of edits). Even if those edits are quite small and localized in general, it would be quite comfortable to just undo the changeset the user made. Is there any way to implement this?

Greetings and happy mapping! Markus

Hello, brave mappers out there! Before the new continents were created, I already had the idea that my southwestern coast could benefit from a warm maritime stream which brings a mild climate to the shores. Now that the new continents are there, I would propose something like a “gulf stream” and hope that my proposal is okay with you.

I just thought that it would be quite nice to build an island “bridge” between our “old world” and the “new world”. When you look on the map, there is half of such a bridge between ER139 and the eastern shore of Norðurland. It would be nice if this island arc would be a liiiiiittle longer, so that it might come quite close to Norðurland’s shore.

I don’t imply that those islands must belong to Norðurland or to ER139; it could also be a third, completely new country. What do you think?