Guild World Map - Community Challenge

[Tonnichiwa]

Actually, it has been done and seen elsewhere before. Campaign Cartographer can do that stuff. It is built into the program. They call it making an interactive atlas. Way back in 1999 Wizards of the Coast contracted the people who make Campaign Cartographer, the Profantasy company, to make them one for the Forgotten Realms. They mapped out the entire known world of the Forgotten Realms, with every supplement they could find for the Dungeons and Dragons game. It let you see the world from the view of a spinning globe, a flat map of the entire planet, the continent of Faerun, etc. It let you click on cities and get information on those cities. In some cases you could also click on specific buildings and get info on them as well. It also allowed you to do this for some dungeons and ships and a lot of different things. They had different zoom levels for maps too.

Sadly, it was done in 1999, when graphics were not as good as they are now. So all of the graphics are from Campaign Cartographer 2. And unfortunately, Wizards of the Coast has not given Profantasy permission to re-make the atlas using newer graphics. So it languishes in cc2 graphics...

It is called the Forgotten Realms Interactive Atlas. Luckily I own it so I am able to re-make maps for it if I wish and create my own atlas for my own personal use. So far I haven't done that but I could.

Now all of that stuff was made using CC2, and I am certain I could do it if every map were made using CC3+, but as far as I know, only my map in the Cartographer's Guild Birthday Mapping Challenge is made with cc3+. So I am not sure I would be able to make an interactive atlas using other people's maps. hmm...you've got me curious now...I need to research this.

[waldronate]

You can do the clicky map thing directly in HTML without any fancy anything else ( http://leafletjs.com/examples/choropleth.html shows how to do that sort of thing directly in the leaflet js framework that is bring used for the GuildWorld map).

I remember writing the Globe thing for ProFantasy as part of the FRIA way back when. I couldn't generate a decent-looking map, but I could write a bit of code (however badly). I spliced together the Globe maps from a bunch of things, including the one WotC map that they used for the intro video. The errors in the link maps were all my own doing, of course. An updated version of the Globe program is still kicking around my hard disk, but the world has moved one in the last 17 years...

[Corilliant]

Yeah! That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Now, if there were some way of making it a bit more advanced, so that it would load maps and icons...
...but Josiah's right; first the maps need to be finished

[Robulous]

I think someone proposed having a zoomable map with Leaflet? There's a way of having clickable boxes and links etc, I've experimented with Leaflet but not managed to pull it off so I'd be interested to see it.

[Corilliant]

I created this little animation to show you guys what I meant. I'm no good with words.
output_glDSkf.gif

[Josiah VE]

Lovely little animation, that's exactly what I thought you meant. Although not quite like your idea Azelor posted this link a few pages back, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qELcbKXdRm8
I thought the video was super cool, it's from the Cooperative World Building Project many years back.

[J.Edward]

The level of detail and comprehensiveness is limited only by our time and ability...
Redrobes has the zoomable map going already with leaflet.js and if others have skills to bring to this - we can make it whatever people want to do, so long as the help is there.
We can definitely create a DL booklet, though size might be tricky to post here on the Guild.
My thought would be that some basic page layouts would be set up with basic font sizes and requirements for continuity.
Each person would do the text for their page(s) within that layout. It'd reduce the work for one person but would maintain a consistency of look.
When the maps are closer to completed, we can work out what that should look like.

I'm happy to keep doing more with this so long as the desire is there with everyone.
Some will likely stop after their map is made, others will want to continue.
But it can be worked out.

I like that little animation Corilliant

[Corilliant]

Yeah. I see this community challenge as a way of making a high-quality product that we can use to promote the guild. The more ways we can do this, the better.
But back to my plot o' land I go...

[Redrobes]

This clickable zoomable map is exactly what we have ! If you go to Robbies map and zoom in then you get an icon over the "city" where it says "The Guild". When you click on that it goes to the guild main page but the idea is to have another zooomable map behind it with the city map of the guild.

The youtube link is mine from when I did CWBP using my app which does all the embedding of the cities etc. Its what I am using to make the composite map and these zoom map base images before it goes into leaflet. We can't have the full ability as seen on the video exactly because your in a web browser but we can get close to it. It will be like it but a bit more kludgy and its a lot more effort since you have to jump through hoops to get the composite map into the leaflet tiles and uploaded to the guild. My app did away with all of that which is why I wrote it. But people want it in their browser so thats the best we can do.

[Corilliant]

Heh, not quite what I meant, but I'm glad that we have that option!