OpenGeofiction
Hi everybody, I’m sure a few of you may have seen me or know me from other places, but for those who don’t, my name is Matt (people call me Zeffy), and I’m a 20 (nearly 21)-year old who unfortunately is unemployed and spends most of his time in front of a computer screen. One of my favorite (if not my favorite) hobbies is studying roads and highways - specifically creating highway signs, looking at numbering patterns, fantasizing about new highways, making interchanges, looking at old highway photos, etc. I’m also a global moderator on AARoads.com forum, and I help with some internal stuff over there as well. To top it off, creating fictional cities is another one of my favorite hobbies, of course after seeing other people’s creations on here I realize that my versions are absolute crap. Artistic talent was never anything I once had…
Right now my project on OGF is the Republic of Hiltonia. I was introduced to OGF by other members of AARoads, and thought it was a cool idea, since I essentially had the idea of something very much like this site except as a forum community thing - of course I couldn’t figure out how the heck to actually make something like this, so I was quite delighted when I found OGF.
Unfortunately, I have severe AD(H)D, and that means many things in my country are… sporadic and often thought up at a random moment then forgotten. Realizing that my country, in its current form, is quite a mess, I decided to try and reconstruct it using a lot more planning - something that, as you can probably imagine, is very hard for me to stay focused on. With that being said, I would like to ask a few questions for the community here, so that I may ultimately build a better country:
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Geographical features. I suck at building these, whether it be forests, mountains, rivers, or lakes. Anyone got some tips that might help?
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Street scale. I have looked at so many real cities on OSM, and yet I cannot wrap my head around this. Scaling is so hard on OGF for me. For one, I use the American measurements since I don’t have a clue how long a meter is, but I still can’t figure out the median amount of space streets in a grid should be spaced out to not look like I was cramming everyone in there. On top of that, same with the geographical features and pretty much everything else. Any help on how to at least get a decent scale (besides highways, which I figured out relatively well) for my cities and other things would be very appreciated.
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Is there any way that I could get my whole country in OGF, so I could work on it without having to download each 13-zoom segment in JOSM? Working on small areas seems to be my downfall, well, sort of, but I just like working on everything at once. I’m pretty sure this is impossible due to how much bandwidth that would suck up, but hey, it was worth a shot.
Thanks for reading, and I hope to meet and see everyone else’s creations here!
-Zeffy
Discussion
Comment from NE2 on 19 December 2014 at 08:54
Rivers: you should probably decide on the general terrain of Hiltonia. You have several big lakes, so it’s probably relatively flat outside the eastern part of the country. As the owner of Woolonia, I decree that the eastern part of the border area is mountainous. So there will be rivers flowing west (or south into Brythonn) from that area. For the rest, you should generally keep the network singly connected: that is, there is only one way to get between any two points. The main exceptions are extremely flat swampy areas or artificial canals, which probably need locks to keep all the water from exiting. As it is, you have a problem, with a closed loop in the northern part of Hiltonia. Unless you’re making an Escherian landscape, this needs to be fixed. Decide which lakes are higher or lower and make the water flow in the right direction.
Comment from NE2 on 19 December 2014 at 08:57
Street scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_block
Since the spacing of streets in grid plans varies so widely among cities, or even within cities, it is difficult to generalize about the size of a city block. However, as reference points, the standard square blocks of Portland, Houston, and Sacramento are 260 by 260 feet (79 m × 79 m), 330 by 330 feet (100 m × 100 m), and 410 by 410 feet (120 m × 120 m) respectively (to the street center line). Oblong blocks range considerably in width and length. The standard block in Manhattan is about 264 by 900 feet (80 m × 274 m); and in some U.S. cities standard blocks are as wide as 660 feet (200 m). The blocks in Edmonton, Canada are 560 by 330 feet (170 m × 100 m).[2] The blocks in central Melbourne, Australia, are 660 by 330 feet (200 m × 100 m), formed by splitting the square blocks in an original grid with a narrow street down the middle.
Comment from Sarepava on 20 December 2014 at 00:07
…although of course you don’t have to build US-style gridiron cities. Older European cities will either be built with lots of small medieval streets winding around a fortification (see Tallinn, Prague, Krakow etc); an early-industrial canal system (Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Birmingham) or an imperial grand boulevard at the centre with smaller streets coming off it (London, Rome, Budapest). For these areas, the distance between streets can be a few houses and the roads may be at any angle (depending on terrain) and there will almost always be a large watercourse. Further out there may be areas containing landscaped housing, with buildings separated by trees or playing fields in a non-symmetrical pattern. It just makes things more interesting for the map viewer and residents than seeing forty-five parallel avenues each six miles long.
Comment from BMSOUZA on 20 December 2014 at 00:29
…adding the Sarepava answer, Isleño created a excellent topic about it in Wiki
http://opengeofiction.net/wiki/index.php/OGF:Making_realistic_cities
Anyone that create and edit a city in OGF need t othink about any “model”. In that link there are a lot of “models”. In my case, I am inspired in Brasil when I am editing Cariocas… There are not a exact standart block in Brasil, hehehe
Comment from Zeffy on 20 December 2014 at 18:21
Thanks for the responses guys; everything here has been helpful to me as I replan Hiltonia. The reason I choose the grid-layout is mainly because I’m American myself, and I actually love the grid system in cities and towns. I tried drawing a non-grid system like I would find in say England but it turned out pretty horrible. Regardless, I don’t like “boring” grids that just go on for miles - I like to add diagonal routes, smaller blocks, etc.