City at scale

[Brombur]

I was kicking around an idea I had with a fellow gamer today. Short version was to create a Google maps style fantasy world where you could zoom all the way out to see the full world and then all the way in to show any location at a 1sq = 5' DND scale. He said such a thing was impossible so I did the math and found that an average fantasy town would cover approx. 1 square mile, 5280'. Breaking it down you would need 441 50x50 square maps at this scale. Creating it a 1/5 this size still leaves you at about 84 50x50 maps. My question is has anyone seen a project on that scale before or is it really to crazed an idea to be viable?

[Mouse]

I think this is a common dream, Brombur. I've had it myself.

The awful truth is, though, that unless you intend to spend the rest of your life mapping this one fantasy world, its not really all that practical.

Imagine for a moment that you are going to single-handedly map the entire Earth the way you described. That's 57,268,900 square miles of land (this doesn't include the oceans). There are 27,878,400 square feet in every one of those square miles. It would probably take quite a long time to map a single square mile at the 5' grid scale, even if you were only doing this as a very simple black and white line map with no fancy arty stuff involved.

Lets say you're really fast at mapping, though, and you can do this map of a square mile in a week, even when its a square mile in the middle of the biggest metropolis that ever existed and requires you do draw an unbelievable number of little lines for every wall, window and door contained in that square mile (not to mention all the floor levels, as I assume anyone involved with RPG would desire).

Ok, so if it takes a week to do every square mile, you will need to keep drawing without a break for the next 1,101,325 years.

Even if you got really really fast and did a square mile every day, you'd still need to keep mapping for the next 156,794 years

...

In short, you're far better off just doing a simple world map just to show where all the countries are in relation to one another, then a handful of regional maps marking the major cities, rivers, roads and settlements on each continent, and then a selection of important cities as city maps.

[ChickPea]

You could always get involved with our Guild World project : https://www.cartographersguild.com/f...splay.php?f=91

It's perhaps not exactly what you want, but the more people who pitch in, the more developed the world will become. We've got countries, cities and, recently, dungeons too.

[Brombur]

To hand draw it would take that much but with computers and teams of folks it would be doable. based on what I have seen in the development of the game Star Citizen, where they have created procedural methods to generate essentially infinite 3d worlds, this is more than possible. Your math is spot on but remember that much of the space in a fantasy setting is going to be open lands the real time consuming work is cities. still look at the level of detail in games like Skyrim which have detailed maps with some zoom for a massive 3d world. Undoubtedly it is a massive project but one I can see being possible. I'd love to be a part.

[waldronate]

I have seen a lot of projects over the years that have declared themselves to be on the order of the magnitude that you describe. The grand vision of a whole world to mold, endless possibilities, and the excitement to make it all your own cause these kinds of projects to pop up again and again. However, they seem to fall apart within a couple of months to a couple of years (most describe themselves as "dormant" if they acknowledge the lack of activity at all, but years keep going by with the barest of twitches from them).

There are usually two problems that cause them to fail: lack of coherent vision and lack of return on investment. Settings benefit from having a strong central vision, which usually means a single person's vision. The majority of people really don't seem to like to work for free on ideas that aren't their own. Having a world with lots of little areas with nothing to generally hang on results in some really disjoint results.

It's the same general problem that most collaborations ultimately have: grand visions die a slow death under the sheer weight of the work required to realize those visions. Look at the endless array of abandoned (or more charitably, "inactive") open source projects on GitHub or SourceForge if you want to see how often these things tend to fail.

Massive worlds like Skyrim have massive budgets and massive staff to bring them to market. Their vision is compelling enough and their audience large enough that the tiny fraction of people who are willing to work for love is still large enough to keep a little interest going over time. It's quite uncommon for this sort of thing to work. Even most AAA game worlds don't gather enough of a following to keep going when the initial excitement wears off.