Contrary to the current mood (at least here in cold and Omicron-struck central Europe), I’d like to invite you for a short holiday trip; for a less cringy message, see below.

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Let’s start by grabbing something to eat at a newly opened breakfast-cafe in edgy Óram’uel. From there, we can walk into the old town and join the masses of less trendy tourists posing for selfies in front of the Opera and buying cheap plastic souvenirs around the Zoésora Temple.

After wandering around the Ballet Theatre and the Museum of the Oceans at the new, modernesque harbour front, we take take the Metro Line 2, which follows the course of the oldest railway in all of Kojo, to an exquisite beach-side neighbourhood named after the two things that make it and the city great: the sun and the coast. Here, we join the high (and less-so-high) society of the city in sunbathing and swimming for a little while. Afterwards, we can take an Express bus back to our Hostel in the studenty Ōnagara neighbourhood. Every street bustles with cafes and restaurants, with little Boutiques as well as chain pharmacies. After a quick shower and nap, we are ready to head back out again.

As we walk south, the quirky vibe is replaced by a more sophisticated atmosphere in posh Thurn et Sasó. The Fóskiman Chigai-Showugan, Kojo’s most renown art museum (unless you ask people from the capital), is impressive enough from the outside, so we disdain its treasures and instead go for a picnic in the green lung of the city. Although dedicated to the Revolutionists of 1834, nowadays it is a source of tranquillity and chill for the Finkyásenians, who sometimes, between work, study, loud traffic and long summer nights, need to force themselves for a brief pause.

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Hello fellow Geofictionians,

after almost two years without any international travel (due to some virus whose name I forgot) I was fortunate enough to be able to travel through Italy for the last two weeks; by train, of course. Now, usually I wouldn’t use this website to post some elaborate travel blog - and don’t worry, I won’t - but I saw something I just had to share with this community.

Many of you probably have heard of the Vatican Museums before, and that they are a must-do-item on any travel list for Rome, just after the Forum Romanum and just before posing in front of other selfie-stick swinging tourists at the Trevi Fountain. What I, ignorant me, didn’t know before going there, is that the massive museum (which somehow fits into this 0.44 km² souvereign state alongside St. Peter and the HQ of the Catholic Church) not only features endless corridors of statues, tapestry, paintings and any kind of collectible you could think of, but also the “Galleria delle carte geografiche”. For anyone who spent a good part of their childhood sketching fantasy maps on paper, this corridor is like a trip on drugs. I’ll let the pictures below speak for themselves. 5/5 stars, 100 % recommended for mapping-enthusiasts!

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Hello everyone,

I’ve spent some time the last couple of days on a rather intensive project, where I once again took on the task to crunch some numbers regarding inter-city train travel in Kojo. I’ve now officially opened my first Bliki to showcase the results, and would love to hear your thoughts as well as your advise on my follow-up question.

Cheers

Leo

Hey there,

I am looking for a way to automatically compute ridership numbers for my country’s intercity railway services. I did a first attempt at an excel sheet, which spits out numbers of travellers between one of 34 agglomerations in Kojo. The next step would be to allocate those numbers on route segments to visualise accurate cross sections of passenger flows on the system, but I’m not sure I know how to get their from a technical stand point. Advise is very welcome.

Here’s the link, and there’s a preview down below.

I just want to put these 5 notes here for everyone to read who wants to have a look at this or might fool around with it themselves:

1) “Spawn” and “destination” does not imply a trip from spawn A to destination B. Rather, cell J7 for example says: There are 1934 trips taking place per day between Kwaengdō and the Finkyáse agglomeration, where the trip maker is living in Kwaengdō and temporarily staying in Finkyáse. Combine that with the 1479 trips where a Finkyásenian is visiting their grandmother in Kwaengdō, and you get a total of 3143 trips per day between the two cities, or roughly 1570 per direction.

2) A number of riders “gets lost” in the formulars, as the attraction shares never add up to exactly 100%. For example journeys from Pyingshum to Pyingshum are obviously not taken into account; that means the number of trips per person and year should be set slightly higher than the actual value.

3) While the attraction share can kinda compensate for this, one should keep in mind that in the real world for example a young student city will spawn much more trips per inhabitant than let’s say a former industrial town with much poverty. This model assumes every city spawns the same amount of trips per inhabitant, and just their destinations are determined by the attractiveness of their destination city.

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Hey there,

I have a more or less quick question about, well; I guess the title says it all. I’m not even sure if it’s possible, but I think I’ve seen something like this on the wiki a couple of times, but I might be wrong. The closest thing I actually found was Luciano’s “old” RUTA-VC map, and I wonder whether similar things are possible without an external script. For my personal liking I wouldn’t need to click on the map and have extra info displayed; I’m looking for a way to have a osm-data-fed map that displays route relations for Kojo’s intercity railway services, so I don’t have to bother poor paint (rest in peace) every time I do a tiny change to the network.

Any suggestions welcome! Thanks a lot

leo

Hey there fellow mappers!

I have a love-hate relationship with mapping buildings. On one hand, I love the feeling of scale and detail they give to a map. They are the first step in creating a city that is more than just a network of roads and rails. So what’s to hate about them? Well, I’m no architect (surprise), and especially when it comes to representative buildings I continuously fail to produce anything that leaves me with a sense of satisfaction.

Currently I’m having trouble with the heart of the Kojolese government, the Gankakuchō so Hyosilwe. I redid that area recently, and now I’m struggeling to come up with a new building. To be fair, I’ve done everything to make the situation as complicated as possibly, and I wouldn’t want to swap roles with the architects in 1990’s Pyingshum.

I’ll try to summarise the basic idea in a few key points:

1. administration around the chancellor had been growing for decades, need for an adequate office space that could also be used for representative purposes became more and more urgent, however unfulfilled.

2. A fire in 1984 (read more) puts a large area in central Pyingshum to ashes, killing hundreds of people. The event is a major disaster for the government of that time conspiracy theories have their heyday.

3. The area is to be rebuilt, with a new Chancellery facing the Jōbun so Gúwan place. However, the building needs to be built in a way that it doesn’t evoke the impression that it outshines the adjacent memorial park dedicated to the victims; yet it still needs to serve for state receptions and other representative events, while also providing the executive with much needed office space. A somewhat, contemporary feel shall be used.

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A quick note regarding the current main page of the wiki; I’m aware I’ve fallen behind the update schedule again, but I can’t maintain it currently because I’m sick. Sorry for that, but I’m sure it will do for another two weeks, until it’s the much more reliable Paxtar’s turn again ;) Blurry greetings, Leo

Hey there,

I recently realized that the number of International Organisations in Pyingshum is rather low; or rather, more or less zero. Now, the last thing I want to promote is a “race” on who can win the most organisations for their respective countries, and I’m sure there are more than enough to come up with to make everyone happy. So I took some time and browsed the wiki (both on OGF and the real world Wikipedia) to look for some organisations that I would like to locate in my oh-so-glorious capital. However, I want to check with you guys if there are any objections or comments. It is very well possible that some organisations might already exist in OGF in one way or the other, or would make more sense to be located in the same city as a “mother-organisation” in some cases. So feel free to criticize my claims in all ways possible please! Or if you are particularly fond of one of them, I’m sure arrangements can be made ;)

In no particular order:

• International Organisation for Students Exchange (maybe affiliated with the ANESCO?)

-World Archive Organisation / World Library … Could be just an international body for cooperation between libraries world wide, but if Pyingshum was seen as a worthy city I would also be happy to map an actual “world archive”; maybe alike to the modern library of Alexandria. I also already have a spot in mind, next to the National library close to the Besoegawan Norikichezi Station.

-International Museum Cooperative; This office could promote the exchange of loan collections between museums world wide.

-International Council for Science; this organisation exists in the real world as well. As far as I’m aware it functions as an umbrella group for all national science organisations. Obviously, all major branches of science have parallel organisations on national and international level; I feel fond to also claim the

-International Mathematics Union (but again, don’t want to seem to grabby)

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Hello fellow mappers,

I’ve had the pleasure to once again visit Prague during the last couple of days; hence I wasn’t able to update the wiki main page, and I forgot to do so in advance unfortunately.

One thing I wanted to share with you though was the following two pictures. I stayed in a cheap hostel at the edge of the old town of Prague. To access it, you had to enter a very inconsiderable front door, which led to a rather run-down stair case. All floors but one were occupied by either the reception or dorms, but on the 3rd floor there was the portrayed door, with a small sign declaring this to be the embassy of the Democratic Republic of Congo in Czechia.

My point is, I often find that when we (and this very much includes me) map embassies (especially our own ones) we tend to go slightly overboard, most commonly even assigning a whole building or even building ground with large gardens. While such embassies exist, they are most commonly found only between major countries, or perhaps due to a colonial past etc. Any two medium sized countries (think below 50 mil) that are not even situated on the same continent will usually not have that much demand for diplomatic office space that it would require a whole building. Of course in the end many other factor play into this as well, aside from the wealth and desire for representation of the represented country the general city shape will play into it as well. In the real world, dense European old town centres will be much less inviting for free standing embassy buildings than new world planned capitals such as Washington D.C. or Brasilia, or cities with generally low property prices such as developing countries. But nevertheless, I think I might go back one day and readjust both some Kojolese embassies abroad (coordinating with the respective mappers) and foreign embassies in Pyingshum.

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Hey there,

I’m a bit lost when it comes to importing additional templates (usually infoboxes) from wikipedia to the ogf wiki. I’ve copied the code for the official post template, as well as the respective /doc template, but don’t really know what to do to get the items in {{{ }}} show up as they should. Do I miss “sub-templates” from the original wiki, or is it a completely different issue? And is this idea even practical? Thanks in advance :)

After seeing more and more great posts on here about the work people are inspired to by Luciano’s current challenge, I stepped back for one second and thought about why I haven’t had the motivation to go along with this month’s challenge. I realised the reason was pretty simple; I have no realistic, well thought-out vision for how exactly agriculture in (central) Kojo is supposed to look like.

A short disclaimer in the beginning; to the north, in more mountainous areas, I’m slowly developing a more realistic land coverage, and I imagine agriculture there to focus mostly on cattle and hay (if any), and in the eastern portion, though relatively flat, I also mostly envision quite dense forest coverage. The complete western half of the country is a story on it’s own, as I’ll try to shape it into a mix of very sparely populated, not very fertile grassland, prairie, heath etc… if you have any advice on that as well, your comments are of course very welcome ;) On the coasts I haven’t really gotten to anything agricultural yet, but I think I will have many real life examples for the swampy river delta area around Jaka (looking at you, Netherlands!) and the rest should work out with the respective hinterland.

What I’m really struggling with however is the central, densely populated part of the country. For example, when I mapped some fields around Rō, really the only thing I could come up with was looking at how big farms in central and western Europe are (since I want Kojo to have an “old-world”, non-griddy character) and then randomly assigning all kinds of crops. It looks “good” as a “background” for the city, but doesn’t really tell a story.

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Hey there,

this is just a quick announcement that I’ll have the chance to travel around central Japan for the upcoming three weeks. This will include Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and probably Nara. I’ve seen in the past that other mappers made many photos they took available to the community, and would love to do the same with some generic landscapes, city scenes or whatever is “needed”. So my question is, does perhaps one of you need a certain “type” of picture, like dense residential neighbourhoods, railway stations, or anything else that you thinks is more likely to be found in Japan than in your home country? If yes, just leave a comment here and I’ll see what I can do :) I find that most photos online are always quite recognizable, and perhaps by using some unusual angles or less well-known spots I could get some photos more fitting for OGF… although the steamy weather might cut loose all these ideas anyway xD (On a different note, I obviously won’t be able to participate on here very much during that time)

Cheers, Leo

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

Hey there,

I have a quick question; is there a way that I can get my cities’ names to showon the map rather than the names of the regions (-iki)? It really bothers me that a large portion of my cities aren’t visible from high zoom levels because the names of the regions are rendered above them.

Cheers, leo

Hello everyone,

just a quick question; I’ve downloaded the latest ogf-backup an hour ago (18th April), and, as I usually do, cropped and transformed it into an osm file with the size of my country using osm convert. Only that while editing on JOSM, I’ve noticed that there were some unconnected and untagged points here and there. Comparing with the browser map, I’ve found that all of them either were tagged with railway=station or place=town or place=suburb;they were all still as they used to be when I looked through the browser editor, so the problem occurred either with the data set itself or during converting. If I had uploaded my “changes” from JOSM to OGF, I’d have done quite some damage to Kojo and adjacent territories.

Usually I’d just think that the data set is impaired, but at least its size looks very reasonable, 191mb, and I wonder why it’s only such a very limited number of objects that’s affected? It would be great if another mapper could check if they have similar issues with the newest backup file, and I just have to wait for the next file, or if it relates to osm convert :)

Cheers,

Leonard

Hey fellow mappers; in the last days I’ve started on yet another city in Kojo; the city of Yoyomi and its immediate surroundings.

The city’s development is slightly inspired by the historic development of my home town, Cologne. There are a few parallels visible I think, but it is on no way supposed to be a clone of any kind. I’ve placed some mock-place-names in German, which I associate with certain types of neighbourhoods from here, but they will definitely change since they are only small notes for me; so don’t worry about them for now please ;)

With this mapping approach I, as I do with Ro, thought about the vague history of the city and the order in which its neighbourhoods grew. But more importantly I started mapping upwards down, that means I only mapped general landuse for now and the absolute core infrastructure; neighbourhood development will only take place when I finished the overall layout. That might seem obvious, but is actually quite a step forward for me since I sometimes even used to start working on little neighbourhoods before having thought about how big the city is even supposed to be xD

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Hello Community!

I’ve been working on my capital Pyingshum for nearly as long as a year. I think it’s time to go over the project in a bit more detail, and get some overall feedback and comments.

1. History

The history on the wiki article is quite wordy and yet not very detailed regarding the development of the cityscape. So, here is a sketch of ~when each area was (for the most part) developed.

http://imgur.com/mtAXTZ3

Of course the city already had some low density suburbs outside the motorway circle before the 1950’s, but the parts inside of it were mostly developed by then (apart from the blue social housing zones). Also I think I drew the “1950’s” line to close to the centre, just think about it as if the inner city had been more or less developed until the 50’s, then the circular motorway was built and the outer suburbs were forming ;)

2. Suburbs

Of course a city so big often leads to growth in close towns nearby, and most of them now are just another suburb in the big city. Inside of the inner city there are 5 former separate town centres, that now became just another local shopping/entertainment centre. These places were growing maybe as early as the medieval ages, and fused with Pyingshum before the dawn of the 20th century.

Further out there are another 5 local centres; I imagine that they might have existed parallel to the large city and might even have developed independently throughout the times of industrialisation. With the rise of the automobile they then were knit even tighter together with their big neighbour, until at some point the suburbs just merged. Now they are mostly densely built up side-cores, that also serve as little transportation and local supply hubs.

http://imgur.com/QHiUWaY

3. Residential

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Hey there, maybe someone could give me a quick tip how to fix this issue?

I’ve downloaded the most recent OGF-backup, and cropped it with osmconvert to make some edits to Kojo’s railway network. So as usual I selected “13b”, to convert to .osm and keep ways and areas that go across the cropped area. When I opened the resulting file in JOSM however, it only showed point; ways and areas inside the selected area weren’t shown, however ways that DID go across the border for some reason showed up, see first picture:

As you can see the filter in JOSM is turned off. To test whether the problem might have been related to osmconvert, I directly exported a small area from the OGF map. When opening that chunk of data in JOSM, I get the result you can see in the second picture above. Ways etc. are shown, however they all look the same and are indistinguishable from another.

It might be important to mention that I use a new PC, and therefore had to install all tools mentioned above anew. Anyone who know what the issue is, and how I can resolve it? Thank you in advance :)

Hey there,

I will try to keep this short ;) As you’ve might noticed I used a more or less made up language for my country Kojo from the very beginning. The language has been and is still developing, but I would say that I managed so far to keep the language used on the map and in the wiki relatively consistent.

Now, of course I want to make the language also plausible from a geographical and historic point of view. I tried to lay out my basic idea about the origin of Kojolese in the following wiki articles, and would really appreciate it if some of you could quickly glance over the passages and then tell me what you think about the general concepts. I’m already aware that many details will have to be bent to make it work, but probably there are also some major mistakes in it that I haven’t come across yet.

Kojoshi and its history Slightly more extensive history

Some details I think I need to coordinate with the community as a whole are:

*how can I explain the existence of Pyilser (basically Armenian, although I don’t really know anything about the RW language ) as the common language in the area before the 1620’s?

*Belphenia and Hoppon seem to be fitting countries as sources for Japanese (Nihonish?) speakers during the great wave in the 1620’s, but I’m not sure if it’s possible to harmonise our countries’ history in that regard?

*I’m aware that there aren’t any countries with a language based on Chinese on the continent (yet), so do I have to consider to reattribute these words to other language groups? I don’t think reattributing the vocab would be too bad, since the influence isn’t too obvious.

*I think I need Korean and Chinese (or similar languages respectively) as a main influence on the phonological system; especially Korean. I know that Kojolese doesn’t sound anything like real Korean, but the difference between Armenian and Kojolese can’t be explained by just adding some Japanese to it…

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Hi there,

since a while I’ve been sporadically working on the city of Jaka, in addition to slowly expanding the neighbourhoods of the capital Pyingshum. The city centre of Jaka is largely inspired by the city of Amsterdam, and is supposed to be not car-free, but well… very unsuited for regular car use at least ;) However, I’ve run into an issue to the north of the historic centre, west of the central railway station. Here, a highway comes from the north, and some other major arterias are supposed to connect here to exchange traffic with each other and feed to/off the highway. It is however also situtated at a relatively large body of water, so that a “simple” single interchange is not very easy to realise. Im unsatisfied with the current layout, mostly because it involves a diagonal bridge and some weird 2-level constructions and ramps. Regarding the traffic flow it quite maches up with the picture I have in my head, but can you have a look at it and give me some creative feedback or tips to improve it? Thanks :)

P.S. If you look at the historic centre, you ‘ll see that the roads with the type “unclassified” mostly cover up the canals unless one zooms in to a very high level of detail. I’ve tested a different road type on 4 streches of road , which makes the canals much more visible and the street more distinguishable. Could you quickly mention what you think about this and which rendering you prefer and why :D?