OpenGeofiction
Good mapping and hello!
Here are some things to make your city/town or country better!
- Avoid making Grid-topoli, cities e.g Los Angeles have grids, but not like everywhere!
- Avoid using large roads too much, in suburban and downtown areas, use tertiary ways as important/main roads, residential ways as smaller roads, like between houses/buildings, and smaller ways as ways connecting houses to streets etc.
- Use large roads when connecting a city/town to another. When connecting to a village, use secondary, when connecting to a town/smaller city, either use a primary road or a trunk, and when connecting to important cities/capitals, use a highway.
- First build the big stuff, such as roads, then smaller stuff as streets, districts, intersections, interchanges, then smaller to important buildings such as train-stations and bus-stations, then again to terrain and average buildings.
- Rarely use a highway in the middle of a city. Highways are important ways, which should be used in connecting important cities/capitals. Highways consist of at least 4 tracks, such as Autobahn. Trunks may be used outside downtown and suburbs, as they only consist of at least 2 tracks and up to 4 tracks.
- Countries should consist of 30% Highway, 30% Trunks, 20% Primary/Secondary, 10% Tertiary and 10% smaller roads.
- Historical cities may consist of “spider web” based road systems, modern cities and areas may consist of curved roads, or grids (avoid too many grids), use inspiration from other cities. European themed can come from London, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Paris. Slavic themed can come from Moscow, Kijev, Minsk and Jerevan, Middle Eastern themed cities can come from Konya, Baghdad, Damascus, and Tehran. Asian themed cities can come from Beijing, Tokyo, Mumbai and Bangkok et cetera.
- Avoid from all costs names from the real world, Embassy of Canada should be instead Embassy of Commonia, OGF does not “allow” city names or country names from the real earth. And better, create your own city and spread the words!
- No need to name roads. For me, the most important roads to name are Highways/Trunks, Secondary/Primary, and sometimes, Tertiary. Naming small roads are a waste of useful time if you have a country which 80% of it is empty. Even prof-mappers don’t name small roads!
- When you have a new country, decide if you start geographicaly, or with roads and residentials. It is recommended to start with geography, because then it is easier to modify cities and etc.
Hope it helps and i would be happy if someone could help me too!
- Theruler
Greetings from Hifnakia!
Discussion
Comment from zhenkang on 14 October 2018 at 12:30
This greatly summarised the OGF:Making realistic cities page. There should be a page for OGF:Making realistic roads for this.
However, road names are still important. They still provide important flavour to a specific neighbourhood. Maybe name those streets in a government area? The port? A key part of a city?
Grid cities are still important for carefully planned modern cities and American-style cities, even then, they should be pretty rare and built quite recently.
Comment from Luciano on 14 October 2018 at 14:00
I also disagree with the “don’t name roads” suggestion. Where in the real world do roads not have names? I will ignore a map without that important detail.
Comment from superleaf1995 on 14 October 2018 at 14:09
In nuevo laredo exists roads without name “S/N” (Sin Nombre/Without Name), so i think no name roads exists, but they are rare.
Comment from superleaf1995 on 14 October 2018 at 14:10
Also i dont name roads because i ddint finished uzkeshan lang.
Comment from Luciano on 14 October 2018 at 14:17
@ Jesus Antonio - frankly, when REAL WORLD maps don’t have names for things (i.e. streets) it’s because of bad mapping by REAL WORLD mappers. Names exist. Aún los callejones de los barrios bajos de mexico, de las favelas brasileiras, de los 신도시 coreanos … all streets have names as given by the people living on them and using them. Sometimes the government or the mappers (e.g. google maps, OSM) are doing a bad job at collecting the information, or have some political reason for not wanting names recorded (e.g. these are not authorized development). But the names are out there. And by adding names to the map, you go from “abstract representation of the world” to “meaningful representation of human geographic diversity.”
Just my two cents - I try to never map something without a name. I know I’ve done it, but I hate myself in the morning.
Comment from trabantemnaksiezyc on 14 October 2018 at 15:11
Well…
Grid-based cities are quite common in the New World. Look at Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, Melbourne. Old World also has examples of such cities: Barcelona is one of these, although here they are much less prominent.
As for connecting cities to each other, there is no rule. Motorways and primary roads should be only used when they are absolutely crucial, similarily to secondary roads (which could be a little more common, though).
Never using a highway in the middle of a city would also be a tough one, given that American road planners from the Cold War period seemed to love these :) . Similarily, there are many cities in other parts of the world where highways or other major roads pass through the city center. They don’t necessarily need 4 lanes either - most if not all of highways in Poland use a 2-lane per direction arrangement, while many national roads (marked as primary on OSM) are 1-lane in each direction.
The percentage of roads in a country is absolute bull. Yes, highways are more visible on lower zoom levels, but OGF is mostly about details, as in: what is in between the highways? It was always like this: settlements appeared first, then the roads connecting them. In OGF it might be easier to start with the latter, but we need to make it look realistic.
I don’t see why you are dividing cities into “european”, “slavic” (are we not European?), “middle-eastern” et cetera. Every city is different, and often you can find completely varying examples right next to each other. For example, Milton Keynes and literally any city that’s located nearby. Sure, there are similarities between cities that are in the same part of the world, but the changes in grid layouts and buildings aren’t a thing one can draw a line on.
Naming roads is important, and while I personally don’t do it before finishing everything else, they add to the detail. And if they are in a conlang, or a language forgein to the mapper then they are definetely worth admiration.
Comment from theruler on 14 October 2018 at 16:30
The thing is, that i meant that naming roads should be names WHEN YOU ARE DONE WITH THE IMPORTANT THINGS.
Comment from Luciano on 14 October 2018 at 16:32
Naming roads, putting in natural features like lakes and thinking about topography, thinking about the history… these are the IMPORTANT THINGS. Motorways, and more motorways, and other kinds of major highways. These are NOT IMPORTANT. They are the last things built in the real world, and should be the last things built on your map - not the first. This is my opinion, and I don’t always live up to my own words, but that’s my feeling.
Comment from Thunderbird on 14 October 2018 at 17:13
This post is almost the exact opposite from how I map. I like to map an entire small area of my city, naming everything, and Patriot City is a grid city by nature. It is supposed to be representative of an American style city that had most of its expansion around the 1930s and 1940s.
I admit that when I started the city looked quite rough, and I have strongly considered remapping the urban core (because it is pretty crudely mapped, I was not familiar with JOSM). However, in general, I do not agree with this post.
If you are a good enough mapper, you can pull off a realistic looking grid city.
Comment from Gubble on 14 October 2018 at 20:31
@Luciano I mean, the vast majority of roads do have names and I agree that naming roads should be somewhat a priority. I myself wrote a macro to automate most of the naming process (a have a large bank of road names which the macro assigns to a road). However, there are governments who don’t give road names- the Japanese government doesn’t give road names. However, Japanese addresses are so idiotic so in this alternate universe, I have chosen to name my roads.
On the topic of the main post, this may be a useful reminder to yourself but for other people, I don’t think it is helpful. Different mappers map in different ways and each have their own made-up set of rules they follow.
Comment from zhenkang on 14 October 2018 at 23:51
Also about motorways, it depends on your city. It depends on the demand, and whether your city has the space and resources for it. For one thing, I admire how Tokyo and Osaka really do their motorways: Built on top of existing roads, or underneath if you have more money. Even for Jakarta and Bangkok, but this doesn’t solve the traffic jams, so in short, these motorways are a waste of expenses.
I recommend motorways to be done only if needed. If you want, try not to build them through pretty crowded areas like the central core. Generally, the motorways go around the downtown but rarely through it.
I hope the comments don’t bring you down, after all, everyone has different ways of mapping. There are not really standards (but we still aim to go by the OSM standards). Just enjoy the mapping process.
Comment from whateversusan on 15 October 2018 at 04:48
Naming individual roads and filling in details as you slowly expand is fine–I map more like Thunderbird in that I start from a small point and map my way outward. I try to mimic the expansion of the city that way.
I also try to allow for the country to have indescribably bad planning! Ynn in Suya Ahn has a transport network that doesn’t connect to poorer parts of the city, because that’s how the people who run things there did it. They also built some fairly ill-advised highways and numbered their streets in a very confusing fashion. This was all deliberate on my part (without things getting bizarrely out of hand), because it makes the place unique. Doesn’t your city have relics of bad planning, dumb fads, rich people ruining everything, civil unrest, and more that make it the way it is?
For example, my own city in the USA has two massive highways that intersect in the center of the urban core. Was it a bad idea? Oh, yes. But it’s real. It affected everything, including development patterns.
I think the advice here is good for this mapper. But each of us have a different style and different priorities, which is why each of our countries end up being so splendidly different.
Comment from Black Baron on 15 October 2018 at 17:30
Always be logical: first step is creating geographical features, second step thinking about where people decided to settle in the past according to natural resources and geopolitical issues, third step is developing the ancient cities and towns, 4th step is linking them with ways, 5th step is evolve the urban areas according to the particular history of your countries and 6th step is evolve the ways to roads depending on economical basis. Each step includes two levels: gross detailing and fine detailing.
Comment from Ūdilugbulgidħū on 15 October 2018 at 23:06
First step is learning how to map. Consider your first year or two on this site as the apprenticeship every mapper needs to learn new skills. If anything useful that you want to keep comes out of the first year its just luck that it doesn’t look like a kid’s scribbles.
Comment from iiEarth on 15 October 2018 at 23:15
Where I live in California, the GPS sometimes says ‘turn left onto unnamed road’ or ‘take exit 36b for unnamed roas’. Is it only me?
Comment from Ūdilugbulgidħū on 16 October 2018 at 00:08
Everything has a name. If the GPS doesn’t give you a name, its because it hasn’t been programmed into the GPS (i.e. its a mapping issue). The only way you can justify not haveing things named on a map is that the map isn’t complete, or, in extreme circumstances, that there is an alternative map that does name things but isn’t translatable to this format.