I do prefer to assign shops to malls if the malls are single storey (i.e. most out-of-town locations). I leave multistorey malls (i.e. most city centres) untagged.

The problem with mapping multistorey malls is that you’re stacking different layers on top of each other, effectively leaving an unstructured mess when it’s rendered. This leaves the map both ugly and uninformative, unless you look in the metadata. This is the case for Westfields in London or Grand Central in Birmingham (which is even worse because it’s actually a multistorey mall stacked on top of a railway station).

This leads to another, more general, question - how do we tag multilevel buildings that feature different amenities and landuses on each floor? I usually tag only the bottom floor, or the most important floor.

Thanks for your responses guys!

@KTheBritMC It’s indeed British style. I do focus on making sure urban environments are characterised well when I map. In reality I think it’s quite more nuanced but there’s only so much information you can convey on a map. I’m more of a ‘show, not tell’ kind of person.

In general, the spacing of the roads is all to scale. Keep this road pattern, or at least map according that scale. You might want to delete every other road in Princer View and Little Mecyna though, as the roads are a bit crammed in there. Conversely, you can perhaps increase road density in Westgate City Park. It’s a little bit too dispersed there.

All those dual carriageways tagged as primary roads in Bromley city centre - single them. Generally British dual carriageways in city centres were built in the 20th century, and so were inorganic and planned. British roads also tend to be less straight than what Bromley has right now.

You only really need one road bridge, rather than two going north crossing the river. It’d be better to delete a bridge and join up the roads at a junction on the north bank. Downscale the size of the grade-separated junctions too.

Reduce the scale of stadium and the parliament building. They’re both too large right now.

Remove the urban section of the Battersea bypass motorway. You don’t get many motorways in the centres of British cities, and when they do exist they either serve as a ring road or an artery road. Dual carriageways are also narrower than what is currently mapped (check the OGF scale helper).

Straighten the railways - at the moment the railways curve sharply for no visible reason near Rochester, south of Princer View and at Jaywick. Railway curves are larger and more deliberate in real life

For reference, check the OGF scale helper. It provides as a good comparison tool to assess the structure and scale of mapping.

I like that idea. It reminds me of the Pirate Republic, except those pirates were a nuisance so the British Empire came back and wiped them out. A fate like that is pretty easy to avoid though. The second idea holds water too, that’d be interesting to see. Delmuth’s Wiwaxia is also a matriarchy, though I don’t think Wiwaxia is being actively developed now.

The hydrothermal route is a direction worth exploring though, I can see it happening if enough residual heat was left from the impact if the crater was young enough.

In order to create a site such as Sudbury you need two things: time and scale. A large crater in order to create enough magma so sufficient amount of minerals precipitate out and survive over geological time. Then enough time for the magma to solidify, enough time to put any global and lasting environmental effects behind the present day. and enough time for erosive activities and tectonics to cause uplift and erosion, exposing the minerals at an accessible depth. The only two impact sites which are extensively mined are Sudbury in Canada and Vredefort in South Africa. Both these craters are billions of years old and hundreds of kilometres in diameter.

Your impact crater is around 7 or 8km across and is situated in the tropics, in a coastal area with a lot of erosion. Your crater is pretty well preserved and it hasn’t been infilled with sediment - you can still see its rim, central peak in the sea that has filled it This means geologically it’s pretty young. The moon is a very bedrock-dominated landscape that experiences no erosion, which is why your crater currently looks so ‘fresh’. If you’re intending to create a large, old crater on Earth at this latitude, you’ve got to take into account erosive processes too.

In short, I don’t think your crater, as it currently is, is large enough or old enough to be economically viable as impact craters are in the real world. The alternative option is for a crater to excavate preexisting mineral deposits and bring them to the surface during impact. As these deposits would be underwater, the question would be if it was economically viable to mine under the seabed on an island.

It’s good to see more of your mapping, I’m quite excited to see you back in Uletha. I imagine there could be quite a bit more interaction between our two countries now. The whole Wystro-Glastian history would need a bit of reworking but I’m planning a large rewrite of Glastian history sometime in the future so I’ll be open to ideas for now.

I think I’ve found the problem, I think it’s just the overall zoom factor of my computer, so the issue is localised with me. I will find a way to fix it myself. Thanks for the pointer though.

Will I expect Laugar Island to be moved in the near future?

I expect worldwide, crippling economic sanctions on the company ‘Vivion’.

For all intents and purposes we can assume the OGF planet has a single moon, similar to the one in the real world.

On a more important note, please don’t map a spaceport in Commonia. Commonia is a poor and impoverished country and would not be able to finance space travel.

Strictly speaking there’s nothing stopping you from creating a de facto independent state in Commonia. In fact Commonia is composed of multiple de facto independent states. You just won’t have the exclusive editing privileges that users have in official territories, as in Commonia anybody can edit what you’ve mapped. That’s the approach I’ve taken when mapping Laugar Island. Also heads up, it woulf be a good idea to delete all the bridges and tunnels you’ve built between the islands, as they are unrealistic.

After I left Commonia I sorta assigned myself as a de facto admin for the Katsnelson area, to make sure nobody does anything too objectionable or unrealistic in the region. It hasn’t been very demanding, as not many people have mapped in Katsnelson itself since. Most people who do map in the vicinity, such as in Capsburg, are sensible. Once I finish mapping Laugar Island I plan to do the same as I have done with Katsnelson and just monitor it to make sure mapping quality is preserved.

It’s probably better to have the roads meeting at a less oblique angle. It’ll make more sense to have a single motorway junction for all directions, and then a simple, unconnected flyover for the other intersection.

I’ve always taken that information, regardless if the country is ‘lost’, to be officially ‘canon’ unless it’s overwritten, obviously incorrect or contradictory. I also border Latania, and I just treat it as if the user was still active. I’m sure the gap between Ävled and Latania can be filled in as you would map normally.

Agarderia, as you know, was communist from 1945 to 1986. Since it was a small country I don’t expect it to interact much with its anyone outside its immediate communist neighbours.

There was, however, a 4 year period (1955-1959) under the presidency of Sullus Hett in which Agarderia turned hardline isolationist and formed ties with more ‘ideologically compatible countries’ such as Belphenia and Antigo. This isolationism put Agarderia at odds with both its own people and its traditional allies, which culminated in a coup which ended his presidency. Sullus Hett was sent into exile in West Commonia and eventually assassinated in 1966 by the Commonian secret service, possibly on behalf of the Agardirian Government.

This information is on my sandbox page, where most of my ‘de facto’ history is contained. For all intents and purposes it can be taken as historical, unless it gets overwritten on the main wiki.

I can see the southern border wall, but fences do not render for anything below zoom level 15.

If you would like to make it more obvious you could try and look at places in the real-world, such as the border fence between El Paso and Cuidad Juarez or any other place with barrier infrastructure, such as Guantanamo Bay, the Turkish-Syrian border, or the Palestine-Israel Border.

Typically as well as a fence, there tend to be military installations, parallel roads and checkpoints. Both the border and the barrier tend to follow a natural obstacle such as a river, which serves as an extra line of defence. These objects will render at higher zoom levels.

I have to ask, Where is the need for a border fence? Is it realistic for your country and does your neighbour know about this fence?

It’s shame it got reverted, I think you mapped it quite well.

The diary entries tend to get cluttered with easily-solvable issues such as these. Perhaps the users who complained were eventually given territories and so their posts were deleted because they were redundant.

Schools and hospitals are a slightly brighter colour too. Slightly too bright for my liking.