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I saw how it's done with viewing dale, quite interesting.
It's good to know that you are interested in the project. But I must admit that the intro index is a bit odd.
I have been lurking this thread for a while but its about time I chipped in. I was pretty involved in the first CWBP and so have some points to make but also I didnt want to steer the new one. Id like to see how it pans out differently this time. But for what its worth here are some items that worked well and that didnt work so well first time around so you can improve or utilize them again.
We had square tiles which I think was good tho people said that as they spanned different lattitudes then on a mercator style projecion the actual physical scale of them was varying across the maps. It was hard to make equal area maps using tiles that span a significant lattitude range.
We used FT and had a height map for the first CWBP. Having a public high res height map for the whole world / area under mapping was useful as you could as a last resort use a procedural mapping system to fill in any holes left by absentee mappers.
The tiles we had were something like 400km or so across and towns within them were usually mapped at a scale that people did them at unrealistic sizes. At 400km per tile a city is about a pixel or two.
It was extremely useful to nail down the format of the thread naming for each tile and city since we admins created a CWBP map indexer out of the threads so that new places mapped got added to an index automatically - see my sig for the link into that. I am not sure whether its still working tho since the site format for threads changed. But the idea that you can scrape the names under a CWBP2 section to create the index is cool.
I made up the overall map of CWBP (the composite of all the mapped places) and I am prepared to do a similar one for the new CWBP2 if nobody else is hankering for that role. That is not making up the shape of the landmass etc but the collection of everybody's work and stitch it together into the mosaic of finished maps. Like this:
Its not too obvious but if you look closely then it has all of the small regions and cities mapped on it too. It has every map that was done for the region on this composite version. Click on it to embiggen.
Last edited by Redrobes; 01-08-2014 at 09:06 AM.
I saw how it's done with viewing dale, quite interesting.
It's good to know that you are interested in the project. But I must admit that the intro index is a bit odd.
Intro index ? You mean the place index ? It used to be great but all the links are broken now but the idea was that it made the index automatically without anyone needing to edit up some list. If you mean something else then what was it that was odd ?
Index of: Cartographers Guild Members Who Posted An Introductory
I was just wondering what was the purpose. Nothing important
Ahh right I get you now. I joined when the guild was quite small and there were something like 500 members or less. In those days you pretty much knew everyone and people posted a new member welcome. I did a lot of guild scripting where it scraped lots of info from different boards and compiled it into pages like this one. So when somebody posted something you could look up their intro page and see what kind of background they had. Now that we have 10,000+ members thats a little more unrealistic. The other thing is that some time back the guild forum policy changed about your signature format and it became impossible to post an image as your signature. I have my creative commons disclaimer thing as an image because its too long and breaks the text limit so I cant change my signature any more. So lots of these old links are still there even when they dont work any more. I used to scrape the site and host these lists locally on my web page but then we changed and had some space on the guild server to host them and also I relinquished my scripting to RobA who does a great job by incorporating the scripts into the guild PHP instead of me scraping it. So now stuff like this is done differently and that we should have a monthly challenge list and index of entries, the CWBP and topic indexes and stuff like that. I have not kept up with what is currently active now on the site that I no longer do it. But the CWBP composite was done using viewingdale so I did that one and still have that as a viewingdale project to enable me to create these index maps on my local server.
Should the CWBP be revived, I'll gladly chip in. I'm not really that interested in the big pictures and mapping. In low-level detailed work such as characters, narratives, histories, stories and illustrative work I would be glad to participate.
Good to see your still around Kimmo ! I'll gladly keep your signature link up to date with any new illustrations you might do. They were always fantastic.
So, I haven't nearly read through the whole thread,
but I have learned a bit about what this co-op map
was like, thanks to the post by Redrobes. How was
this project accomplished, and (if we were to go
about doing it again or something similar) how would
cartographers join up? Is it open to everyone?
The best maps are the ones we like the most after looking at the longest.
Participation should be open for every members of the Guild (But not the whole internet... they should be able to access the project but not to participate). Also, having a minimum of messages (5 or 10) on the forums before joining could prevent the spam. I know the old project had issues with spam and I don't know a lot about that. I do not know what measures needs to be taken to avoid the problem.
@ 12rounds: yes there will be plenty of stuff to do
This sound like so much fun, are we doing it? Can I join?
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