Thanks again for continuing to answer.Originally Posted by Hai-Etlik
I want to measure "approximate" distances on the world map. For example something like distance from Hawaii to Oregon, or Maine. Or Oregon to Alaska. It would be nice to know the distance rounded-off to the nearest 100-miles. Does not need to be more accurate than 100 miles, at world scale.
I want to measure somewhat more accurately on the Continent, region, state, and city-state scale. I probably want to overlay a hex-map grid on the state and city-state scales. These distances will be used to measure overland travel -- for example, 6 days ride by horse, or 12 days walking, or how-many-miles.
Fractal Terrains (world software from profantasy) has distance measuring tool, that even works on the globe. You may not know it has this feature. I do not know if the feature is accurate but it seems reasonable enough. It works to measure even on Orthographic map. It actually draws a curved line on the apparent globe surface indicating the start-point and end-point of a distance route. I understand this measuring may not normally be possible on Orthographic, but remember FT knows the mathamatical layout of the world in many different projections.
So I put my custom FT Orthographic, and I overlay a "real world" Orthographic. Now using the Fractal Terrains I measured from the point that overlaps "New York City" to the point that overlaps "Los Angeles" (on my fantasy map, different shape continenent but overlapping land mass at similar latitudes). FT measures some 2200 miles. I expected to see 2400 miles. I think it's close enough. It seems to work in my experiment. I could be wrong.
Later I will post a graphic of this Orthographic overlay, when I feel ready to post and show it here.
In conclusion, if I cannot measure distances on my hemisphere map, that's Okay. I would like to measure it ("How far is China from California?"), but it won't affect the game. The in-game travel will only cover part of a continent, maybe 1500 miles x 1500 miles region size for the maximum travel to be measured ("in a year we travel from New York to Colorado"), and typically more like 20 to 200 miles (to be measured on a zoomed scale map not on the hemisphere map).
Agreed. You helped crystalize that choice nicely, and I had not thought about the G.Projector method until this thread. Now I will consider that alternative.
As for what I have completed in FT, I probably need to upload images and show you. I feel that the continents and coastlines are good. But FT has zero abilities for adding City, Roads, Political Borders. It only has mountains, oceans, rivers, lakes, coastlines, islands, Climate, Temperature, Rainfall, geophysical features.
Now I need to export various projections and scales out of FT, and into another software for adding Cities, Borders, roads and paths.
In the profantasy software line, they expect you to export to CC3 (Campaign Cartographer, $40) to add Cities, Borders, Roads, and Touchup. I have not found a free demo of CC3 so I have not tested how this works & would like to hear from Cartographers on this site who used the profantasy software to do this. Because I don't have the CC3 instructions, I don't know what settings they recommend for exporting FT to CC3. And I don't know what projection and scale the CC3 map would be (?).
From what Hai-Etlik said, a possibly next step is exporting Equirectangular from FT, import to G.Projector to "pretty up". So would G Projector give me nice features for adding cities and borders and roads? I will look into it.
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