OpenGeofiction
There is a very helpful tagging guide at the OpenStreetMap site which means I have been manually adding details and features to the map which are not shown in the sidebar. One particularly nice result of this is that I can now label mountains and hills which helps give a sense of topography to the landscape. Indeed, the entire layout of a country depends on the location of highlands and flatlands, since these dictate where watercourses run and so where cities are founded and how transport links will connect them.
Discussion
Comment from thilo on 26 March 2014 at 21:42
Even more sense of topography.
Comment from isleño on 27 March 2014 at 04:47
How did you do that, Thilo?!?!
Comment from thilo on 28 March 2014 at 17:47
That’s a bit complicated. I had already created an elevation model of my country “Roantra” for the purpose of displaying my hand-drawn maps on a virtual globe. See here to get an idea:
http://urbangeofiction.stadtkreation.com/yasheu/
Recently I learned (primarily from Opentopomap, who put their map style on Github) how to convert my elevation data to something that can be processed by Mapnik (the rendering software used by Opengeofiction).
Now obviously the hard part is generating the elevation data in the first place. I wrote a tool for that, but it’s probably not suitable as a general tool for modeling elevation data. First, it was tailored very much to that particular purpose, which meant mostly copying contour lines from an already existing map. Also, since I was the only user, ease of use was not my foremost concern.
It is my plan to some day have an elevation model for all of my territories, but that’s probably still a long way ahead.
Comment from isleño on 29 March 2014 at 06:09
Well… I’m speechless. It’s awesome. I wish the whole OGF globe could look like that someday.