OpenGeofiction
Based on real forest shapes from Earth. They definitely look more natural from a distance, not much difference closer up though. I can reverse the changesets if people don’t like it. In one or two places a smidgen of forest has intruded into a town, but that can easily be fixed. If you have thoughts feel free to share.
isleño
Discussion
Comment from wangi on 12 March 2015 at 00:19
Looks good!
Comment from histor on 12 March 2015 at 00:19
Is is indeed so, that frontiers of forest must be drawn less generell. And at more dense population, the frontiers of the wood are more and more to draw in small pieces as the wood there is among the grass and the fields (and the towns and villages). Only in very less populated areas wood can be drawn generious.
Looks good, your new Gobrawood.
Comment from indyroads on 12 March 2015 at 00:31
So now there is fore s t in some of my urban areas… also the forest area was to show mountainous areas now there is forest in the valleys… I am not opposed to reworking the forests as long as the existing valley areas are kept.. I would revert and start over.
Comment from indyroads on 12 March 2015 at 00:33
Maybe not so much detail also… since there is no real topography it’s hard to judge the terrain with this new forest.
Comment from indyroads on 12 March 2015 at 00:36
I also agree with history th a t the smaller sections of forest should be drawn near urb a n areas and less detail or more generalization in denser forest areas on mountains and remote areas.
Comment from Luciano on 12 March 2015 at 03:58
From a “best practices” and OSM standards standpoint, using forest areas to show moutains can be problematic. I have been trying hard not to do this in my countries, and view “landuse” (including tags like “natural=wood”) as completely independent of topography. In drier areas, for example, forested areas actually tend to be the valleys, not the mountains (look at parts of Mexico or California).
I use “natural=ridge” to indicate mountains and mountain ranges, and it works well. Of course, it doesn’t show up on the map - it mostly serves for my own reference in JOSM. If you want it to show on the map, one solution I have used sometimes is to add “highway=path” “embankment=yes” to get the ridge to render. It’s a bit of a render hack, but you can conceptualize it as a “crest trail” for a given mountain or range (see this area of Mahhal, where the ridges thus show up as faint dashed lines).
Comment from indyroads on 12 March 2015 at 11:21
I can see your point Luciano. Rather than using “land_use=forest” to render the mountains, I propose that we use “natural=scree” to show the mountains/raised terrain. of course lower rolling hills would not be a part of this, these would be used to show the areas where there is a significant change in terrain between flat or relatively level terrain and mountainous terrain. This way both the “land_use=forest” and “natural=scree” would be rendered at the same time and would display properly in OSM.
I dont have all the data to post all the mountains back again like they were before. Missing data for most of the northern mountain ranges along the northern coast and around Gobras City. These mountains were necessary to show especially due to tunnels and valleys around the area. In addition the mountains in Alora will be updated to the scree tag and I will begin to work on the forests there to mirror Gobrassanya.
Additionally it appears that the “natural=ridge” tag is still in development with OSM and as such is not currently rendering on the maps. the hack idea is kind of an interesting hack on showing the ridge line. I am not sure what kind of developments are being planned for showing mountains and ranges but hopefully soon there will be more appropriate options.
Comment from histor on 12 March 2015 at 12:43
Indeed to show mountains and ridges, OSM (and OGF) is very poor. I will try to set some “path” as lines of equal highness as a test.
Comment from indyroads on 12 March 2015 at 13:08
Ok so “natural=scree” does not render on our version of OSM using either the standard or histor layer views. however the “natural=heath” layer does at the closer zoom layers. that could be used until a proper alternative can be found.
Comment from thilo on 12 March 2015 at 13:58
I’ll upgrade the map style soon, then natural=scree should show. This was introduced in OSM only recently, and we’re always a bit behind.
Comment from histor on 12 March 2015 at 14:24
Indeed “scree” is not shown (momentaly - if thilo will install). So I take “heath” or “scrub” for vegetation in upper areas of mountains, where no wood shall be.
Comment from thilo on 12 March 2015 at 15:22
Oops, there was a problem with the upgrade, so I had to go back to the old version. I will investigate this, but don’t have the time at the moment, so it will have to wait a few days.
Comment from isleño on 12 March 2015 at 18:36
The old forest lines of Gobrassanya are all still there, as part of an “Old Forests” multipolygon. I just removed the “landuse:forest” tag from them so they don’t render on the map. The new forests generally follow the old ones… as a wet subtropical climate with heavy development, Gobrassanya is one of the many places where forests will correlate very strongly with elevation. The main difference is that some forested areas are now found in the valleys (especially valleys that had no development) and some cleared areas are found in the hills, which definitely makes the topography less clear. There were a few places where a forest hit a town… let me know if it’s hard to move the forests and I’d be happy to do it.
I’m afraid “scree” “shrub” and “heath” won’t be useful in Gobrassanya, unfortunately. At 20°N the tree line will be 3500-4000 meters elevation (11500-13000 ft), so only the tips of the very highest mountain peaks would be naturally treeless. On most maps you can tell where the valleys are by looking at the patterns of rivers, settlements, roads and cleared land, which I think we have a strong framework of in Gobrassanya. If there are valleys that should be more defined, we can always clear some of the forest in those valleys to make them more obvious. We can also put a few summits along some of the mountain ridges to help define those better. What do you think?
Comment from antoon on 12 March 2015 at 18:40
Nice discussion about how to tag the higher areas on hills and mountains. Over half a year ago i started with forests to show the more hilly sites in Neberly, but soon felt that as the country is rather far up north there should be a treeline, say over a 1000 meters. Therefore i now have many large areas that are no forests but should be mountainous. Certainly in the west where the forest don’t show the hills but rather the valleys. Heath, scrub of scree will be useful to fill these open areas. I also plan to use natural=glacier to show the real high areas. I also have been using the natural=ridge tag but perhaps Luciano’s idea is a better alternative for visualising these ways.
Comment from Luciano on 12 March 2015 at 23:44
If your main concern keeping track of the moutains during the development of your country, then you can use all kinds of lines tagged with ad hoc tags or “note” tags which store on the server and appear in JOSM (and you can even get them to render in various customized way in JOSM) but which don’t appear on the map. I have done this extensively, and then, when an area gets filled in, I delete these “sketch” lines.
If your main concern is for the render, it is undeniable that OSM doesn’t really render moutainous areas well, but the obvious solution exists “for the real world” and thus it is not a priority: contour lines. There are many useful tools that integrate OSM with contours, all of which open source SRTM satellite data. No “real” map in OSM needs to worry about mountain rendering.
Our problem in OGF is we don’t have anything like that SRTM data set. Thilo has experimented with creating one in a few small areas, like his country Roantra and for Khaiwoon. It’s a big project.
It is possible to draw your own contour lines in JOSM - I have done this in a few areas. Thilo told me not to upload them, and I have respected that request. I keep them in offline saved “layers” which I open when I edit in JOSM. My hope would be to at some point figure out how to convert them to “fake” SRTM data that could be uploaded a la Roantra.
Having said all that, mountain information is something we need as we develop our countries, but it isn’t really necessary for a nice looking map to render once a country is “filled in.” There are parts of Ardisphere where I have mapped enough that the mountains become obvious, even when not explicitly mapped, just because of the shape of roads, land use, and other features: http://opengeofiction.net/#map=12/-24.8857/124.6200
Comment from tom_m7 on 13 March 2015 at 00:45
I thought the forests were supposed to show mountains… Other than that, I like the detail. Looks like we need another way to show mountains without having OpenTopoMap layers or forest areas to use, though. I also feel like forests are kind of sparse - maybe that’s because I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for about half my life now.
Comment from isleño on 13 March 2015 at 05:58
In parts of the world that were originally forested and then heavily settled, forests often correlate with mountains, due to the fact that flatlands were deforested to make way for agriculture/cities/etc. So in those settings - such as Gobrassanya - drawing forests is a good and very visible “shortcut” to sketch out where the mountains will be.
But if we want our maps to attain the realism of real world maps, then eventually we need to take things to the next level. In the end, the only legitimate way to show mountains is the same way that OSM does: using a more complex texture of forests/clearings in conjunction with roads, settlements and mountain-related features such as summits, wilderness areas, glaciers (at appropriate latitudes), etc, to create patterns that indicate the presence of mountains. It’s not easy, but I think Gobrassanya is ready to take that step. (?)
Comment from wangi on 14 March 2015 at 01:33
I think what we’re heading toward is generating contours for Gobrassanya (contour=elevation ways). Questions are: * How can that be done collaboratively * Can they be uploaded (technically - yes; by procedure on osm - no; here with less data - ?) * If not, how to share the data so it can be used & edited by many ?
This then enables all the rest - we don’t need to abuse forests & scree to try and show mountains… We can edit based on the contours which represent the elevation.
Comment from JBstad1 on 16 March 2015 at 03:16
They are so well pronounced isleño, I like it. It’s like an actual map with an array of details. If only I can manage to create forest, mountains and level of detail like that (I’m still fiddling with my Maaiza city). I still dream of doing something like that of a contour plan of my country Eureisia that I did via SketchUp.
Great job!
Comment from isleño on 16 March 2015 at 09:54
Thanks, actually I’m still trying to clean it up. Generating that much detail over that much area, there was no way to avoid some sloppiness… the forests invaded towns, airports, a few harbors, etc. It’s still a work in progress. But I do hope to share the method behind it so that others can try making similar stuff in their own countries. I think we could all learn a lot from each other by sharing the different tricks we use… hopefully we can start doing more of that!
isleño
Comment from Easky30 on 16 March 2015 at 20:48
I think the new look looks great. The new look makes it look as real as anything in OpenStreetMap when zoomed out. There’s some minor woodland areas I will need to fix in Arrowic but I don’t mind. Is this new woodland created in some type of model?
Comment from isleño on 17 March 2015 at 06:27
Thanks Easky. I tried to fix some of the stuff in Arrowic but of course there’s more to do. It could definitely look better close up, but I think it’s a decent starting point, at least. People editing small areas can edit the forests however they please, to get whatever local look they want. Meanwhile the zoomed out version looks pretty realistic, I think.
The way I created the shape was (1) started out with forest textures from a real world map of tree cover, (2) cut the textures into small pieces and reassembled them to match the shape of Gobrassanya’s mountains, (3) saved that shape as SVG and then (4) imported it to JOSM with the import SVG plugin. It wasn’t very hard, but the result was a bit sloppier than I wanted. I’m hoping to try other methods in Niulutan-Riu and UL125 to see if I can refine it a bit. We’ll see…