Often, mappers are advised by admin to use OSM as inspiration for their work.

So naturally, some of us might gravitate towards the more extreme or interesting examples of real world mapping, like this.

One thing that this, and many other weird examples of mapping have in common is their location - China.

As it turns out, every map of China is geofiction - by law ! According to Article 61 of The 1992 Mapping and Survey Law of the People’s Republic of China, any surveying or mapping of mainland China is illegal without specific authorization from Beijing.

So bottom line, anything you see in China on OSM, Google Maps, or any other map, is unreliable unless you confirm it with an outside source.

What complicates things is that some of the more extreme stuff is real. For example, this 33-km bridge over the open sea is real because it leads to this real port (though I can’t confirm if the mountain in the middle is real).

The good news is that we can still use Dubai for inspiration.

Maybe.

Last January, I started work on a new city named Confluencia.

In Commonia, (of all places) there is a well-mapped and highly-developed [city] (https://opengeofiction.net/#map=12/1.6076/142.2853) also named Confluencia.

Did I subconsciously copy this city’s name, or did it change recently?

This post is for native Spanish speakers.

I’m currently working on Castellabájo (Xʌшtaııʌҕʎɔo), a language based on Castellanese for San Basílio state in Unesia. Spanish is not my first language, so I’m not sure how it would seem to a native speaker.

I’m currently deciding between two different historical narratives as to how the language and script developed. Knowing how close or how far the language is from the original will help me determine which story I’ll go with.

What are your thoughts, based on what I’ve mapped [here] (https://opengeofiction.net/#map=14/-31.5302/165.7941)?

Are you able to decipher the transliterations? Are the contracted words potentially confusing? Aside from the written script, would you consider this to be a separate language or a dialect?

Gracias!

Just wanted to let everybody know, I won’t be mapping for the next 3 weeks or so.

God Willing, I’ll be traveling to the U.S. for the first time in 9 years to visit friends and family in the beautiful state of Maine.

In the meantime, Happy Mapping Everyone!

I thought I’d share this article comparing population densities of European cities.

It has a lot of information on how, when, and why the most crowded neighborhoods developed, and includes several satellite images for reference.

This could be useful for those of us who might be designing European-style cities in our OGF territories.

Lately I tried to re-edit the boundary between Cameron and Ghranata states in Unesia.

It had been a year since I first made the boundaries, so I re-read the tutorial on Administrative Boundaries. It seemed pretty straightforward, yet after several attempts, the [boundary] ( http://opengeofiction.net/way/7888313) didn’t [render] ( http://opengeofiction.net/#map=8/-30.761/166.179).

Another weird thing is that the boundary showed up in JOSM, but not iD. I didn’t notice any breaks in the way, and the end nodes are all connected to the adjacent ways in the relations. I also checked for duplicate ways and found none, so I don’t know what the problem is. Maybe it’s something obvious I’m overlooking, but I can’t see it.

Can anyone help with this?

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of detailed work in the center of
Musawir . I’ve been feeling OK about the detail work, but the geography of the surrounding cityscape has been a nagging problem. I don’t want to proceed with more detailing if the geographic foundation is too unrealistic.

I originally designed the city about 10-12 years ago and traced it into OGF. The initial concept had the Taswir River spelling the word “Musawir” in the Almukhtaran language as it passed through the city. The city would become a capitol and center of religious knowledge due it’s auspicious location. It’s extreme population density would be the result of people crowding to live near the sacred river and it’s surrounding lakes.

After doing some research, though, I realized that the water volume for the river wouldn’t be nearly enough to justify it’s width. It would need a much larger watershed, extending deep into neighboring territories. Also, I never liked how the river had to run north to go south to Ma’amil.

Eventually I changed to the river into a lake , hoping to solve the volume problem, but that created a new problem: I needed an impervious barrier to keep the water in the lake, so I envisioned the city having a ridge to the south that would be formed of solid granite. That’s fine, but then I needed to justify the shape of the lake, so I figured that the areas the lake filled in were made from weaker soils that over time eroded. But then I would have to construct massive levees to keep the rest of the city from flooding. it seems the more corrections I made, the more problems arose.

I’m hoping that someone can help me with the hydrological aspect of the cityscape so that it can be salvaged in a realistic way. Musawir plays a crucial role in the history of Unesia. If I move it or erase it, the whole country would be affected.

UN1TY

I just opened OGF and noticed my whole country Unesia is now shaded blue. I’m a relatively new user, but this matches the description of a continental flooding, which is bad news for anyone in Archanta. I guess this means no more editing for a while.

How do you add .jpeg or .png images to diary entries?

Also, how do yo get the map projection to automatically show up in the body of the diary entry?

Does this require any coding? I’m not too computer savvy.

With Dorchester National Park, I initially started tracing from a photo, and using the land use and geography attributes to add contrasting colors (park=green, forest=dark green, scrub=yellow green etc.) In the original photo, the mountains were barren, except for some glaciers (which I converted to lakes).

After a few weeks of tracing with the photo, I discovered a more original way to render mountain ranges other than just tracing from a photo, and also better than relying on imagination alone.

First, you will need the JOSM editor with the PicLayer plug-in installed.

Next, cut a long sheet of tin foil (about 2-3 times longer than the width) and crumple it up. Carefully, unwrap it and flatten it out. Now you can shape it according to your needs: you can flatten some valleys or raise some high peaks, as you like.

Once you’re finished, take a photo of your new mountain range and upload it to your computer. Then, open JOSM. Next, open OGF in the location where you want to put your mountains. Click the ‘download’ button in JOSM. Copy and paste the OGF coordinates in the URL field (for those new to JOSM, make sure opengeofiction is your default site, not openstreetmap)

Next, click ‘Imagery’, then ‘New picture layer from file’. From here, you can select your mountain image. This opens the mountain image as a background layer to OGF. Click on ‘Windows’, then ‘Layers’. Here, you can edit the mountain image layer (you may need to resize, rotate, or adjust the transparency) or go straight to tracing by clicking ‘Data Layer 1’.

Scaling the mountains accurately might be tricky. Maybe there are some more experienced mappers here who can advise on the average size of mountains.

Hopefully, this will be helpful for those who would like to render mountains. One caveat is that this is VERY labor intensive, so you might want to stick to rendering a small area you think will be of particular interest, as opposed to a 100-mile-long range.

I just started working on OGF a couple of months ago and have been working mostly in the initial planning stage of laying out my country Unesia, so I don’t really have much mapped out in yet, though I have started bits and pieces, like a city park in Dexter-Overton, a tourist spot in Dorchester National Park, and a small city in Commonia (Somerset).

Over the past 25 years, I’ve been designing fantasy cityscapes and maps, and as a result, I’ve amassed a lot of original artwork.

Today, I was working feverishly compiling my artwork and images in preparation for my wiki pages and, in the process of doing so, pushed my computer to it’s limits.

In the past seven years my Toshiba Qosmio has seen numerous upgrades, replaced motherboards, and even survived a lightning strike, but resizing a few hundred .jpegs finally caused it to go haywire.

It’s still working (as you can see), but somehow it thinks I want to delete every file I open (NOT a good mind reader :)). So far, deleting the ‘delete’ app from the task manager is working, but I don’t know how long I can make that a routine.

Hopefully, I can afford to buy a new computer in a few months, but until then every day this one still works is a blessing.