As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been drawing maps on paper since I was 6 or 7 years old (and houseplans, and schematics, and planetary systems, and many other things, too).
I’ve found my old, main stash of these drawings, all the ones I’ve saved over the years. So I’ve decided to post one “paper geofiction” every day.
Just as something to do.
I don’t always know exactly when I drew something. I’ll give a guess with each one.
This one is an airport (or spaceport), with contours(!), drawn in 1981.
The best mapping in Arhet for this week.
User Moskva, here.
This is better viewed using the “Arhet2-carto” view, which uses the up-to-date mapnik style from OSM, but is currently unreliable.
Moskva is the king of low-zoom mapping.
Music to map by: Zeromancer, “Fractured.”
The best mapping in Arhet for this week (a little bit late, sorry).
User me, here. I’m testing OpenTopoMap style and layer for Arhet, and have placed a copy of my OGF territory of Makaska on the Arhet server.
Music to render contours by: Electric Light Orchestra, “Strange Magic.”
I keep making small incremental progress on Ohunkagan. I start to imagine the city it will be when I reach the “present” – from the perspective of around 1900, which is its current historical moment.
[Technical note: screenshot taken at this URL (for future screenshots to match).]
You can see that the near-northeast has filled in (Balto area). Also, the Conagher Rail Car Company, in the southwest along the portage shoreline, and the Signal Hill area straight west near the line with the town of Mythic.
I have done work farther out, beyond the frame of the “standard” screenshot above, including work at Iyotanhaha, Riverton and Prairie Forge. All these towns will be within the Metropolitan Area’s modern perimeter, once we reach 2020.
Music to map by: Tears for Fears, “Mad World.”
I missed last week, so there is no week 8. Sorry.
The best mapping in Arhet for this week.
User Moskva, here.
Not that it’s great. But Arhet is a low-volume project, so far, so we can’t be too choosy.
These “mountains” are… not really mountains.
Firstly, in a cartographic sense, there is no such thing as “mountains” – there are contour lines, and there are peaks, and there are (sometimes) areas of forest. These water-tagged areas seem to represent isolines of a certain elevation, as a kind of stand-in for the concept “mountains.” Considered as isolines, they aren’t too bad.
Secondly, it hardly needs to be pointed out that mountains are not water. So the tagging as water is an egregious case of “tagging for the render.” I suppose I shouldn’t criticize this – I’ve been known to do such things myself, e.g. my Tehingdalish in The Deadlands, where my bottomless abyss is tagged as an intermittent lake. But that is different, I feel, because in that instance I’m tagging a feature that has no real-world equivalent with something that will show on the map.
Music to improve mapping by: Doit Science, “都市計画.”
For a long time I avoided Maperitive – because when I tried it several years ago it repeatedly crashed my computer. So I thought of it as bad software.
Recently, I decided to give it another try. This is in relation to wanting more tools to be able to develop and understand custom renders, related to my efforts to expand functionality on my own map server.
So just this morning I downloaded Maperitive, got a successful install, and played with it a little bit. I made a google maps style view of my city Ohunkagan.
I tried to make a detailed view of the OGF country called Egani (because my efforts with Maperitive just happened to match up with that mapper’s request for some technical help).
That’s a pretty detailed map – you will have to download and zoom around to see the detail.
Maperitive is powerful, but it’s got a pretty steep learning curve too. I’ll mess with it some more, as it appears to have a stable version that runs on Linux, now.
Here is a map of my village of Goodgrove, on Arhet (my own map server).
Music to view maps by: Muse, “Map of the problematique.”
The best mapping in Arhet for this week.
User Infrarrojo, here.
This the first time I am repeating a user. I guess our community is small. Nominations welcome, if I’m not noticing your work.
Music to map by: 노브레인, “그것이 젊음.”
The best mapping in Arhet for this week.
User theruler, here.
The user made the chain of islands north of the northwest corner of the continent. They are quite realistic-looking to me, at low zoom. Hopefully some nice detailing will follow.
Music to map by: Apoptygma Berzerk, “Until The End Of The World.”
The best mapping in Arhet for this week.
User Moskva, here.
I feel a need to comment on this selection. It is definitely not my preferred style. The geography and patterns of settlement are interesting and well-done, but there are too many motorways relative to underlying detail – there basically is no detail at higher zooms. That’s why the whole thing is being done at reduced scale (i.e. I believe 1 km on Arhet’s globe represents 10 km?).
That said, I appreciate the effort going into it and it’s clearly serious geofiction.
Music to map by: Goo Goo Dolls, “Name.”
Ohunkagan, Makaska, is approaching the year 1900. I’ve done a lot of work on the transit systems: streetcars, elevated rail, commuter rail.
These systems show up very nicely on the “histor” view on OGF:
[Technical note: screenshot taken at this URL (for future screenshots to match).]
I also added the World’s Fair site (directly east of downtown, on the lakeshore), the beginnings of a zoo, and lots of new neighborhoods.
Music to map by: Jean Sibelius, “Lemminkäinen Suite.”
