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?

Hey there, this topic has been on my mind for a while now, and I would like to post it here for discussion.

When mapping my cities etc, I kinda just named all the things in 3 languages: Kojolese, my countries made-up language, English and German; although recently I sometimes name some things only in Kojolese, for example street names etc. However, I’ve seen at many other great maps, that even countries where the “official language” isn’t English/Ingerish, are mapped in English, which obviously helps with figuring out what everything is supposed to be. So my question is, what do you guys think about this?

I like naming stuff in its native language, cuz then it just has a more… natural feeling to it I guess, and it forces strangers to engage with the culture of the place they are viewing. On the other hand, I’m not sure if it sometimes hinders understanding for spectators. They are probably able to figure out which buildings are supposed to be train stations and which not, but without reading through the wiki or opening the map editor to look at some translations provided there, they probably won’t be able to understand why the heck so many stations’ names end on “Dyanchezi”, “Chezi” or “Norikichezi”.

Also, of course, telling names become pointless. Viewers will notice that “Goengyuē-Pang” is a city quarter, but again, without checking in the editor noone will notice that there is an origin to that name, even if only marginal. So how do you guys deal with this? Do you maybe sometimes use hybrids, naming important places with English clarifications, like “‘nativ lang word’ Stadium”? Or do you not care at all what others see when they view your places and are only concerned about your self enjoying the view ;) Hope to hear from some of you!

cheers, leo

Hey there,

So for quite a while now, pictures in my (and perhaps others’ too?) wiki articles that I linked to on Wikimedia Commons don’t show up any more and instead create an error. The following article is an example: http://opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/Daiamondoshi-Pang (look under “cityscape”)

Now what I used to do was that I treated files on wiki commons like files that are already uploaded to the OGF wiki, because it appeared to me that the OGF wiki was somehow connected to Wiki Commons and accessed their datebase. Now my questions are, was I wrong? What changes were made so that now this way of doing it doesn’t work anymore? And what can I do to make the pictures show up again? Do I now need to seperately upload each and every one them to the OGF wiki? Thank you in advance :) Leo

Hello,

as I’m sloooowly starting to fill out at least the inner part of my capital city, I’m also starting to wonder about how to create a both aestheticly pleasing as well as practical metro map. Now, I’ve been looking at some programms here and there and tried some free trials etc., but I would really appreciate if some users who are more experienced with this issue could share their experience and tell me/us, which programmes you used and perhaps even go into a little more detail or share some patterns? Of course tools which are for free are always a favourite option; But if it’s actually needed to purchase a “premium” image-editing software, then it would be nice to know beforehand what other users have archived with it in the past, and how :)

So to sum up, if you have any experience with making maps for public transportation in OGF, please share it here! I’ve seen some great ones in the wiki, so there have to be some experts here ;)

Hello,

if you are interested in opening an embassy in Kojo’s capital Pyingshum, please leave a comment here and I will provide you with a selection of fitting places :)

Please note that the area in question is supposed to be very dense, so it would not really make sense to have elaborate and vast properties there; for reference, this will be the largest embassy in the country, from my neighbouring country Ataraxia: http://www.opengeofiction.net/#map=18/36.43777/119.28677 So for most countries it should be sufficient to have an even smaller part of a block belonging to the embassy.

Looking forward to some replies, hope to see you soon :)

Hey there,

I’ve been drafting an inter city high speed rail network for my country Kojo, and I named it ICTR. You can read more about it here: http://opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/ICTR

I’m trying to come up with reasonable frequencies to run these trains on, as well as reasonable connections in the first place; I layed them out in the above article, besides generall information about the network and its technology.

I’m trying to estimate values for usership appropiate to the system’s major role it’s supposed to play in the inter-city transportation for Kojo, with nearly no domestic air travel and highways mostly focused on goods transportation and highly tolled. I tried to create an easy overview over Kojo’s major cities with their population here: http://opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/Kojo#Demographics

Now, here’s my request; I would really appreciate some feedback on the system, especially if some routes (of which many overlap over long distances) could be overproportionally covered or undercovered. I haven’t made a simple network map yet, and unfortunately the tracks are hardly visible at the moment due to flooding, but maybe some of you guys would like to give it a shot :) Feel free to ask questions or point out any flaws you see!

Hey there,

quick question about a little issue I’ve noticed; I recently started drawing out rough shapes for the harbour in Finkyase (cough thanks to Luciano for fixing some coastline damage I’ve done there… cough), and now this happend:

http://imgur.com/VedFEQW,tKrY9jW#0

As you can see in the second picture, clearly only one breakwater each is actually set up in the datebase, nevertheless they still also show up at a location where I moved them from days/weeks ago. Here are the coordinates in case that helps: http://www.opengeofiction.net/#map=14/33.3686/117.2657

Thanks for your help, happy mapping :)

Hey there :) So, my first post has been quite a while ago now, and I would like to give a little update on what I’ve done so far regarding the map and the wiki, as well as to get some feedback about these ^^

I’ve been working on my country called “Kojo” and focused especially on the capital, Pyingshum. You can find their respective wiki articles here:

http://opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/Kojo

http://opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/Pyingshum

http://opengeofiction.net/#map=7/36.129/118.312

http://opengeofiction.net/#map=11/36.4229/119.3088

I’ll start with the country as a whole; I have the climate laid out roughly for the most part, in accordance to my neighbours, and the geography as well. It has a highway network connecting major cities as well as a secondary network of well maintained express ways (green), which are basically just smaller highways going through the very rural areas.

The major cities are connected via the ICTR (Inter City Transrapid), which is a monorail train network with trains being powered via magnetic levitation that can reach speeds up to 380km/h. Their most distinct feature is their high acceleration rate. Supporting that network there is (but not mapped [yet]) another network of less modern high speed trains, that connect basically all cities over 100k.

You can read more about the country’s demographic and history in the very inclomplete wiki article. Feel free to correct my English or to make it at least a little bit less akward to read, as long as you don’t change any of the information it provides :)

Now to the capital, Pyingshum, on which I focused mostly.

The city has basically 3 cores; -The historic part of town, several centuries old and dating back to the city’s foundation, situated at the river with the castle on top of the hill that is now greenspace, and the historic town at its feet, encircled in the “new” city wall (that is, it is still old, but was built shortly after Pyingshum became capital).

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Hello everyone, I’m relatively new to this thing here and would like to introduce my little project :) I claimed UL020 after experimenting in the community area for a few days first, and am currently building the capital of my country. (I don’t have any names yet, and I’m still undecided on the cultural background such as language etc.) My city’s shape is heavily influenced by Paris, as in that I 1) Designed the “historic” core with a street layout inspired by Paris 2) Intend on having the CBD a bit seperated (in the south) 3) don’t have one main train station, but instead the Far Distance/High Speed Rail System starts from 3 seperate stations situated around the inner city 4) The inner city is embedded in a périphérique like city highway and so it goes on. I obviously don’t want to simply make a copy of Paris, but these considerations are kind of the mainfame of the whole project for now. I hope that I will soon be able to lay out the basics for the country’s culture and society, so I can also eventually start naming things properly xD Any advice is welcomed~ Cheers Leo