How do YOU create various resolutions of the same map?

[Jaxilon]

Somehow I think I am failing to state my question accurately.

Let me try another way:

You are hired to create a world map and several regional maps of said world. Lets say they plan to hang them on their wall. Obviously the regional maps will show more detail than the world map but you still want them to have the same shape and major features.

I guess if it were in vector you can shrink and expand the areas as needed but you still deal with what detail to show or not as well as pixel loss at some point. I don't use much vector software other than Inkscape and I'm not great with it except for making labels.

So basically I am asking what methods have others found useful to do this. I have an idea but if there is a shortcut I'm all ears.

If I was doing everything by hand on paper I would have to make sure I didn't put a mountain where none existed on the other one (world/regional).

[Hai-Etlik]

Somehow I think I am failing to state my question accurately.

Let me try another way:

You are hired to create a world map and several regional maps of said world. Lets say they plan to hang them on their wall. Obviously the regional maps will show more detail than the world map but you still want them to have the same shape and major features.

I guess if it were in vector you can shrink and expand the areas as needed but you still deal with what detail to show or not as well as pixel loss at some point. I don't use much vector software other than Inkscape and I'm not great with it except for making labels.

So basically I am asking what methods have others found useful to do this. I have an idea but if there is a shortcut I'm all ears.

Most GISes have the ability to do various kinds of conditional symbolization based on scale. So you can tell it to do things like, if the scale is smaller than 1:100,000, only display cities with a population of at least 750,000. There are also tools to simplify linestrings and polygons so they are suitable for a particular scale, Inkscape does include a form of this.

[liciobruno]

Most GISes have the ability to do various kinds of conditional symbolization based on scale. So you can tell it to do things like, if the scale is smaller than 1:100,000, only display cities with a population of at least 750,000. There are also tools to simplify linestrings and polygons so they are suitable for a particular scale, Inkscape does include a form of this.

Can you tell us some GIS which is simple to use and open source? I found Landserf, that is very simple, but it is not open source. Thanks.

[Redrobes]

Can you tell us some GIS which is simple to use and open source? I found Landserf, that is very simple, but it is not open source. Thanks.

I have barely used it but QGis is open source free gis app.

[Hai-Etlik]

Can you tell us some GIS which is simple to use and open source? I found Landserf, that is very simple, but it is not open source. Thanks.

QuantumGIS and GRASS are the big names in FOSS desktop GISes, there are also uDig and OpenJUMP which I've heard are somewhat simpler, though I've never used them. For an easy way to install a range of FOSS GIS software on Windows, you might want to look at OSGeo4W.

[waldronate]

I use Fractal Terrains for that purpose, but the public versions only do basic landforms and rivers at this point, no lines or text or symbols. The coastlines and river systems in FT, for example, show an appropriate level of detail for the current zoom level. FT3 can do exports for CC3 to allow for additional annotations beyond the basic level.

If you want to use FT for basic roughing-in to get regional items in the correct places, you can sketch in the desired landforms as climate types. FT has the ability to do useful reprojection to get regional area maps with different amounts and kinds of distortions than the whole-world map.

http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/cshelf/index.html shows a way that world-to-regional mapping can be accomplished in Wilbur, but you're pretty much stuck with the basic fractal elements without painting or erosion.

[tilt]

hmmm..... haven't done this as my current game is only in a "region" - so I don't have an actual world map for the Mountain Realms map - however if I had to have a world map AND full region maps of everything (which may seem a bit overkill - I'd probably just select some regions and map those) I think I'd make the world map first - rough sketch of everything. Then i'd divide it into manageable sizes and map those in high res, finally when all those where done I'd shrink them to make a new world map.
Another attack route could be to make the world outline in vector but I think the first idea would work best for me

[Redrobes]

Ahh yes, now you mention it I think QGIS is QuantumGIS. I did say I didn't use it much But yes thats the generic open source app that people head to.

[Redrobes]

I believe with GMaps then you have various layers of image which the cutter chops up for you. I believe the idea is that you only render the text on the appropriate scale image but I would also imagine that a generic GMap tile cutter would be too dumb to know what bits to include and what to get rid of. So in order for you to have a set of tiles with text that is always the right size then you need to treat each layer of the map individually. The GMap cutter probably just takes one giant bitmap and chops it all up into the correct layers. I guess you could make several large map images with different text labels on them, GMap each of them and then use the tiles from a selection of the sets to make one that has labels that scale ?

With my app if the text is on the bitmap then it will do much the same and you can see that in the video in my previous post. However, if you put down text labels in the app not part of the background labels then you have the option to always keep them on, never show labels and then there is a third option of them fading out when too big. The best video I have of that is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKYU2gcsaoQ

where you need to look at the text as it zooms in.

In terms of hosting, my app can host a map but it needs a special web URL links to show it and over the web interface its not very dynamic. So basically whatever app option you choose you will either have to enter all of the labels so that they are in a format that it knows to fade them out or else you will need to use some kind of web package that can export the map to GMaps from a GIS style original that has all of the items in a database rather than on bitmaps.

From roads and and streams point of view you have the same problem. If you render each layer individually then you could plot them with a single line. If scaling from a large bitmap then they will get small and blend out of the image at small scale. If all you have is the bitmap then its a tough call to preserve small features at small scales. If you have it as a map element database then your into GIS domain again. So I guess the important missing info is what kind of map do you have and is it just a bitmap ?

[sam]

From roads and and streams point of view you have the same problem. If you render each layer individually then you could plot them with a single line. If scaling from a large bitmap then they will get small and blend out of the image at small scale. If all you have is the bitmap then its a tough call to preserve small features at small scales. If you have it as a map element database then your into GIS domain again. So I guess the important missing info is what kind of map do you have and is it just a bitmap ?

Thanks, Redrobes, you described my problem with scaling exactly. Gmap Cutter appears to be a bitmap slicer -- I believe it just
chops the bitmap into 256-pixel tiles; then scales it down by some factor and does the same thing, until the entire image is down to 1 tile or so.
The Gmap API is a nifty Javascript that serves and navigates up those tiles depending on clicks and keyboard actions.

My basic map is a bitmap, but I am working on a larger version with photoshop. Alas, I don't think I am up for buying another commercial
tool ATM, but I willing to use a different method or tools in the process of putting in more details.
My question is -- what tools should I be looking at? Some of my initial searches talk about Shapefiles for map features,
(then using these in some sort of map server)
but how do I create those shapefiles for, say, rivers and roads?
In theory, I understand the difference between vector and bitmap descriptions, but I have no experience with vector tools.

Or am I barking up the wrong tree?