OpenGeofiction
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:
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.
Hi there,
Due to some OSM research, it just became clear to me that I possibly overused footways a lot in my cities…
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.
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…
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?
In Norðurland, the railroads have a large standard gauge, larger than the gauges of the most neighboring countries. However, in the border regions, many tracks have the same gauge as the neighbouring country. So I would tend to tag those tracks as railway = narrow_gauge - as the OSM wiki suggests (the most common gauge in a country should be dawn as standard railway (railway = rail).
However, the neigbour country would most likely tag that track as standard gauge - which would result in “magic narrow-gauge to standard-gauge transitions” at the borders, due to the style in which both types of rail are drawn.
So, what should I do in your opinion? Should I accept that “graphical glitch” or should I tag my narrow gauge railroads as standard gauge, even if they aren’t?
Hello, brave mappers out there!
Well, now we have the new OGF rendering style which I think is pretty neat, after a few days of readjustment. However, there are some things which I really dislike personally.
The new stlye seems to set the focus of rendering to the things that exist NOW. For example, disused (not abandoned) railways aren’t drawn anymore, as well as projected highways.
Actually, I really dislike that. I can only speak for myself, but when I’m designing my country, a large part of my thoughts deal with the development of the infrastructure. Where did it came from and how is it intended to be. And I really want to share this information with you and all “visitors” of my country. Of course, the status quo is the most important. However, I really would appreciate if the past and further development would be a little bit more visible, at least so far as it was in the old rendering theme.
Another feature I really would like to see in OGF is the ability of distinguish between paved and unpaved roads. The OSM Humanitarian theme can render both states of a road (you can check this, for example, with the road network in Iceland). As both countries which I design, have road networks with a high percentage of unpaved roads, I would be happy if we could show this in OGF.
Well, these are my two main points of criticism. Maybe, you also have some wishes or thinkings about the rendering. And maybe, we could give OGF our very own “look and feel” with our very own rendering style. I think that this would be a nice part in the development of the OGF ecosystem.
What do you think? Do you also have ideas for a special rendering? And what does the admin team think about this? ;)
Greetings & happy mapping, Markus
Many of the countries in the OGF world which were left orphaned are marked as “reserved territory”. What is going to happen with them? What is the purpose of that tag?
Greetings, brave mappers out there!
I’m just working on the history of Norðurland. And I thought about that around the Vinn Sea area, there could have existed a commercial-defensive organization of cities and countries like the Hanseatic league around the Baltic and North Sea (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League). In my writings, I currently mention it as the “Vinnic League”.
Maybe, this league could even have been revived in (or have survived until) nower days as a supranational union to ease trade as “Vinnic Union”.
Any suggestions about this (like the name or in general), especially from the Vinn Sea - adjacent state owners? If there are no caveats during the next days, I will create a conforming wiki article.
Greetings and happy mapping, Markus
Hello, brave mappers out there!
Currently, I’m working on a map of the suburban railroad network of Frjálshöfn. I’d like to create smooth curves like in Andy’s map of Puerto Real (see here: http://opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/File:Porto-Real-urban-rail-network.png)
However, theses Beizer curves are driving me insane! I don’t figure out how to really create smooth, even curves for a 45 degree angle, and I can’t even think of making two or more of these curves parallel!
Is sb as experienced as Andy is and can share the magic to me? Inkscape or Illustrator doesn’t matter, I have both (even if I prefer Inkscape).
Greetings and happy mapping, Markus
Hi everyone!
I’ve found out that the renderer messes up with my tram tracks. See an example here:
http://www.opengeofiction.net/#map=17/60.64932/21.29207
The tracks seem to be always on the top layer - even if I didn’t add any layer information on them. Is there a possible fix for that?
Greetings, Markus
