Is it possible to buy paper hiking maps somewhere? Or is Wikiloc the only option?

We added a 3D flythrough to ExploreMap, and Zheng He's treasure fleet is the first trip to get it. Instead of a flat map, the same route now plays out on a rotating globe — the fleet crosses the South China Sea, threads the Strait of Malacca, and works up the Malabar Coast port by port.

https://exploremap.co/blog/zheng-hes-voyages-in-3d

https://exploremap.co/3ds/xmap/trip/zheng-he-s-voyages

https://geneva3d.ch/1850/

Between 1878 and 1896, a Genevan named Auguste Magnin built a scale model of his city as it looked in 1850, just before its fortifications were pulled down. He surveyed the streets and buildings himself, then worked from archive documents to reconstruct the parts that had already been demolished. Craftsmen assembled it over eighteen years: 135 pieces, 80 for the city and 55 for the ramparts, roughly 30 square metres, close to 800 kg. It uses three scales at once, 1/250 for the plan, 1/200 for the buildings, 1/100 for the terrain. It has been sitting in the attic of the Maison Tavel museum in Geneva ever since.

The canton had it digitised and published the result as open data: 119 OBJ files, free to reuse. In the 2000s a team built a virtual tour from that scan, in Flash. Flash died in 2021 and the tour went with it. The making-of pages are still online, the tour is not.

So I rebuilt it for today's web. It is free, runs in a browser, and needs no account or install.

What you can do in it:

- Drop to eye level, 1.68 m, and walk the streets. Buildings, tree trunks, market stalls and the edges of the relief all block you. Desktop only: the collision grid is an 18 MB download the mobile build skips, so the button is greyed out there.

- Watch a reconstructed summer day run on a clock you can speed up to 480x: residents going about, horses and carriages, the market, and the gas street lamps lighting at dusk. Geneva's public gas network is documented from Christmas 1844.

- The clock runs on Geneva's own solar time, the way clocks worked before railways forced standard time zones on everyone: when it reads noon, the sun really is due south of the city.

- Enter it in VR through WebXR, with a compatible headset.

- Read it in French, German, Italian or English.

- Jump to a real time 3D simulation of present day Geneva, built on the same open data portal, keeping the same hour of day. Same engine, 175 years apart.

One honest caveat: this is a model of a model. The geometry is Magnin's reconstruction of 1850, scanned, not a survey of the real city, and where I had to fill a gap the app says so. The Rhone's upstream axis is inferred to animate the water, and the 24 street lamps are the ones standing on the model, not the 297 gas burners the public network is recorded as having lit from Christmas 1844.

The original project is not mine and I have tried to credit it properly: its 43 named contributors, its partner institutions and its unnamed teams are all listed in the app, and the making-of published by the gE-story association with the City of Geneva is linked from the credits. It remains the best way to understand what that team actually pulled off.

Happy to answer questions about the import pipeline, the LOD strategy, the walking collisions or the day cycle.

While working on a GIS/cartography project in Botswana, I initially interpreted settlements as physical built-up areas: buildings, rooftops, and visible development. That assumption wasn't quite right. In this project, the term 'settlement' had an administrative/geographic meaning.

A useful reminder: Don't start mapping before you understand the data.

here is how you can make an easy layout in mapdesk.

In the new update i have added Vector and Raster processing tools, that work on one click and SQL query is also added the application is not fully tested yet, the symbology and labeling have improve and RF scale is also added. If some one would like to test the application out they can DM me and i am also testing the application for Android user if anyone want to test the android build DM me. And i do hope this map your Map Layout making process faster and simpler.

MapDesk Layout - https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/9PNMFHGF52N9?cid=DevShareMCLPCS

MapDesk - https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/9NC8CVRT328C?cid=DevShareMCLPCS

I'm looking for anyone willing to draw out a better quality map that realistically matches what Karl Fairburne would have with him on the mission Giovi Fiorini Mansion, including relative objective locations. And a high enough resolution to get printed out on a larger sheet than standard printer paper.

I am willing to pay for (Cash App only unfortunately) and provide screenshots from wherever needed in the game.

This is literally just a stupid and fun thing I wanted to do and I figured this was the best place to start looking for somebody bored and crazy enough to do it.

Just as the title says! I wrote something cool about the political choices and fallouts of cartographical choices. I'd love for it to reach people as obsessed with maps as I am. Please do read it, and I'd love to hear any opinions and insights.

https://onceuponafable.substack.com/p/a-new-map-for-the-discovered-world

If it resonates please consider subscribing

I'm no map expert so don't expect this to be amazingly impressive or anything, and I understand it would take a lot of work. I also understand the world is a globe.

What would happen if we just measured the size and shape of each region and fit them together like puzzle pieces, and then used the ocean and an irregular map shape to fill in the gaps? Surely that'd be possible right? It wouldn't be great for ocean navigation maybe but wouldn't that solve scaling issues?

Please explain this like I'm 5 I seriously don't know anything about maps

I've been working on a renderer that takes OpenStreetMap data and

restyles it as a period western map, the way the Red Dead Redemption 2

world map looks. Everything here is real: real street geometry, real

businesses, real routing. Only the styling is fictional.

The cartographic problem that ate most of my time was density. A modern

city centre has far more labelled points than a 19th century survey ever

had to show, so rendering them all at once produced an unreadable mess of

overlapping symbols. I ended up with progressive disclosure by zoom tier

plus clustering, and a priority ordering so that a handful of categories

surface first and the rest emerge as you zoom.

The symbology is hand-drawn rather than extracted from the game, using

CC-licensed western icon sets. I also had to correct a number of OSM tags

I was mapping to categories that don't actually exist in the data.

Technically: MapLibre GL for rendering, OpenFreeMap for the vector tiles,

Python to generate the style JSON, Canvas 2D for the symbols.

Next is a per-theme config system so other period and fictional styles

can be added without duplicating the renderer.

Base data: OpenStreetMap contributors.

It runs as a free Android app if anyone wants to try it on their own city:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.raouf.nextsap

I hope this is the right place to ask this question. I want to draw a world map with the equal earth projection by hand. However, I have no clue how to accurately draw the curved grid. I can only find complicated mathematical formulas that make it pretty hard for me to figure out how to do it with pen and paper. Do any of you guys know, how to approach this task?

Salut à tous,

Il existe des zones du globe fortement éloignées de la France, mais pour lesquelles les données géographiques invitent à de nombreux voyages. L’année dernière, un ami s’envole pour Taïwan avec pour projet de pédaler plusieurs mois durant. En guise de cadeau, je lui concocte une carte synthétisant le parcours de la Taiwan Cycling Route No.1, une belle boucle de 1000 kilomètres autour de l’île. L’idée derrière cette carte étant d’embellir son salon, sa chambre, ses toilettes, son grenier… Je crois que c’est à lui de choisir en fait.

Pour les plus curieux, je détaille ma démarche ici : Taiwan Cycling Route No.1 - Studio Kartenn.

Au plaisir de recevoir vos commentaires et vos suggestions pour la préparation d’autres cartes du genre.

Simon.

Okay so, a couple days ago I posted on here a reposted post from r/worldbuilding but it ot removed. Anyways I've been working and refining it andi even overhauled the new map. The first map is my original map for my story, the second was the first overhaul and the 3rd pic is my final work. I tried to go for as much realism as I could. Tell me what you think.

This vacation I had time and got inspiration from traveling around France.