Thread: Cooperative project revival

If we gather enough people, it might work.

I liked the look of where the old one was going...shame how it ended up.
*volunteering his meagre skills*

i would love to contribute some maps and facts... hope theres going to be one in the near future!

I too would be willing to join on a big coop project. Sounds like a lot of fun!

Would it be better to continue to map on the same world : http://www.viewing.ltd.uk/Temp/CG/Th...ld_Jan2013.jpg
or start a new one from scratch ?

Originally Posted by Korash

It was not for lack of skill that the CWBP became inactive. One of the driving forces was the Wiki that went with it and unfortunately, when the Guild suffered a severe hack/spam attack, the wiki got hit and for the worse. There were a lot of work done, both map-wise and in the wiki, by some great talent and it is a shame that it got dropped the way it did. If we ever do this again I am sure that we would do it taking into account some of the lessons learned.

How can we avoid it ? I mean, if we lost the information it was because no back up where made. Someone or more than one person could be assigned to do this task.

A fresh start seems like the best idea to get something going. I'd also be interested in participating.

Now this is pie-in-the-sky rambling, but we might be able to use Perforce/Hansoft to do the versioning/backup of the project. I teach game design, and we're implementing these technologies on our school. To my knowledge, it wouldn't cost the school any addition money in terms of licenses to create a community project, and since community outreach is part of our mission, the school might go for it. I'll need to ask around though to see if this is a possibility.

If not through the school, perhaps the Cartographer's Guild staff could create a Google community for it? Won't have as good versioning, but it would prevent catastrophic data loss.

For those that we involved last time, about how many people were active in the world building? Perforce has a 20 free usrr version of its document management system. That would give us a very secure and safe storage of te documents, and exellent versioning incase we need to undo changes. I'm also looking at Google communities to see if that would work as well.

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Well thanks for the info languard but right now the project is not even planned. I was just asking if people where interested. I told myself to wait till there is 20 people or something before devoting more time to the project.
I have no idea how many people where involved last time and I don't really know how many people are sufficient to start it.

I'd love to participate as long as there is no real pressure to finish what I start. I realize that seems lazy but my hobbies tend to be cyclical.

Some basic questions about the world:

1- what projection should be used?

Mollweide projection, minimize area distorision but alter the shapes but I thikn it's accepteble
Mollweide projection - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Winkel tripel projection, a compromise that reduce all distoritions but none of them are accurate
Winkel tripel projection - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robinson projection: another compromis that is pleasing to the eyes but with more distorition with reality compared to the other two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_projection

Kavrayskiy VII projection: mostly used in the USSR apparently
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavrayskiy_VII_projection

Van der Grinten projection, because it looks cool, and it used to be National geographic default map
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_de...ten_projection

Equirectangular projection, also known as plate carrée: pretty simple to find coordinate
Equirectangular projection - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Miller cylindrical projection: it tries to reduce Mercator excess
Miller cylindrical projection - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mercator projection: no need for presentation
Mercator projection - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I just want to said that the projection will only have an impact on the main map. It will be created in order to fit the projection. Then if we work on the map, there should no problem. Also, feel free to suggest other that you think might be good for the map.

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Other questions

2- what kind of landmass do we want ? and where on the map?

3- what about the univers surrounding it... how many satellite orbit around the planet ?

4- 1 or more stars in the system?

5- planet tilt

6- will it be an earth-like climate? colder, hotter...

Just dropping in to say I'd be interested in this as well, though it depends a little bit on if there are any expectations on how much you should contribute with or if you can just map an area when you feel like it… I don't want to let everyone else down by not having time to do my part.

But it seems like a lot of fun.

Originally Posted by Ghostman

If all the individual overland maps are done in equirectangular projection then the main map (overlaid with the user-created parts) can be reprojected to any other projection afterwards.



Something fairly Earth-like might be the safest option for a cooperative project. That way there'll be an interesting variety of different terrain and local climate conditions for people to choose. Whereas something like eg. a "waterworld" type planet or one that's all deserts would be problematic. There may be more leeway when it comes to things like suns/moons/other planets, depending on how realistic (if at all) you want to get with the astrophysics and all.

I was thinking that we could make the map using a projection, Mollweide for example, and then make rectangular divisions for the separate maps. So all maps would be made using one unique projection. That way, the space occupied on the map is the same as in the "real" world. But it's not the best regarding travel. Maybe this would be a bit wierd, I don't know.

You have a point about the world. If we want a lot of people to participate it's better to have something we are familiar with. We could still have elements that are different.

If you want to keep everything in a single projection, then Mercator is far and away the least bad option. That's why it's used for things like Google Maps and OpenStreetMap. It's reasonable at both large and very small scales. It isn't that good in between (Continents, large countries like Canada), but it's no worse than any alternative choice in that regard.

My personal preference would be to design the world first (Geology, climate, ecology, history, linguistics, etc), and then when it's designed, present it as maps. Done this way we'd be able to use appropriate projections for each map, and where they overlap, they would be drawing from the same source data and so should be consistent. So instead of stating with the smallest scale, designing everything, then subdividing doling out the divisions, and letting each mapper add/refine the details of everything within their segment, It would be starting with the most basic aspects like tectonics, and we'd get that nailed down at all scales then figure out climate, then ecology, and so on. Then when all the layers of information are done, we can make maps. Of course I admit a lot of people would find this approach less fun as the 'making pretty maps' part is delayed until the very end, and not everyone is interested in all the different things that would need to be dealt with.

Ok so we will keep fancy projections for later.

But isn't Mercator worst than Equirectangular projection since there is more distortion ?

What software is best to start the map and for the climates? They used fractal terrain the last time if I'm correct.

Originally Posted by Azelor

But isn't Mercator worst than Equirectangular projection since there is more distortion ?

The best way to think of it is that all reasonable projections distort the same amount, they just distort different things in different places. It's really more a matter of what they preserver rather than distorting. Mercator preserves bearings, and angles in general (it's "Conformal") . Equirectangular preserves the cardinal directions (but not other bearings), and distances north-south (but not distances in other directions).

Conformal projections like Mercator can be zoomed in on, and things will be approximately the right shape. Hence the use in web maps. It does make things the wrong size but if you know the latitude you've zoomed in on, you can just alter the scale and get everything looking pretty good, although the bigger the area you look at, the more the scale will vary. A map of Canada in Mercator looks fairly wonky as the arctic islands are WAY to big compared to the mainland. Equirectangular will result in everything being stretched out east west. You can pull the same scaling trick as with Mercator (only scaling east-west though) to squash it back, but you'll still get variation in stretching/squashing with latitude within the map. This is more obvious and unpleasant looking than the all directions scaling of Mercator.

Mercator is useful for zoomable maps, for navigating along paths of constant bearing (Following a compass), and for dealing with the shapes of things over a global scale. Equirectangular is mathematically simple, and that's about all it has going for it as it is otherwise ugly and doesn't preserve anything particularly useful that other projections don't do better; it's mostly useful as an intermediary that's easy to transform, not for finished maps.

You made a good explanation Hai-Etlik, thanks for the clarification.

So anyway, what kind of landmass people would like too map?

1 massive continent with small islands surrounding it
Archipelago with scattered islands
earth-like continents or something similar

or something else...

I have a thing for super-continents, so that'd be my vote And it could have a really big archipelago somewhere too; doesn't have to be one or the other. How about two massive continents, fairly close to each other, with an archipelago in between?

Of course, maybe I shouldn't be speaking to loudly as I hardly even know what the CWBP is, or if I'll be able to participate… but those where my thoughts

What about using software that maps thingsto a sphere for the core world map? The one I'm familiar with us Fractal Terrains by Profantasy, but I know there's others out there. The advatage to this that the main world map would have no distortions, and we could project it out in many different formats.

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Yes I was considering using FT for the main map since it's easy to crate worlds with this including altitude, temperature and precipitations. And it's possible to change projection without any effort. Then export the map in jpeg in another program for the next step.

And by the way, with fractal terrain , is it possible to smooth the terrain at a specific place?

There is a roughness painting tool and it also allows for selections where you can adjust the roughness, if that helps.
Tutorial for Cartographer’s Guild was done in direct response to the last community project world.

Attachment 57246

what do you think of this ?

Be sure to take FT's rainfall and temperature results (and the climate information derived from them) with a pound of salt. FT doesn't model any kind of water or air transport (and their associated heat and rainfall), so the results are not even close to "realistic".

My hope in providing the rainfall, temperature, and climate tools was to allow users to paint them in as they needed, but it seems that very few users attempt anything like that.

And the Gaia coloring is completely ad hoc, based on nothing at all (the rainfall and temperature adjustments have asbolutely no impact on that particualr shader). If there's one feature that I would have left out of FT, it's the Gaia shader.

Don't worry I already know about that but the map do look pretty good even if they don't make any sense. Gaia show the wet places in yellow while it's a color associated with deserts.

I might eventually do more realistic maps of this world, I just need to know what people think of it so far since it's supposed to be a community project.

The black picture was intentional. You will see it's gonna be so awesome ... but later

For now, I made the maps showing major oceanic currents and winds. It's still a major improvement from my first try, but still need more work. It's inspired by randigpanzrall work's wich is probably inspired by my own previous work. Similar style maybe by accident but he did a better job than me.

winds in january, blue blobs are low pressure zones, red are high pressure

Attachment 57659

winds in july:

Attachment 57660

the oceanic currents, I will add the colors later and will probably need to delete some arrows, they are too many.

Attachment 57661

If these maps are alright, I will make the climates and precipitations.

Are the maps correct?