gareth_w wrote:This is a good discussion, as the major world I'm working on at the moment is a polar/scandinavian setting.
What I have used in the past is a dodecahedron "net" template to work out how regional boundaries would fit together. How that would translate into a software program I don't know. I've used a program in the past that allowed you to render your flat world to a sphere (can't remember which, sorry), but that still doesn't help the design.
It sounds like you are just ahead of me, in this area.
gareth_w wrote:OWM from the video seems to be an island/continent/land mass tool - thats what we've been shown so far, but that doesn't mean that's where the limits are. Using it as a full world design tool - is it in or out of scope? or is that a v2 thing? Don't know yet; would be interesting to find out.
I'm guessing that you could probably ignore the main bulk of the planet and design your polar region with the pole in the dead centre of the map. That should allow you to use OWM (or any other tool) to create a polar continent that is the exact shape you need. But I'm not sure how you could then shunt that data up to become a strip at the top of a rectangular projection (aside from following Thorf's G.Projector technique).
I had a chat with one of the OWM staff about this sort of thing in the replies to
Update #4: Almost at 70% and more features
Other World Mapper at Kickstarter wrote:David Shepheard at Kickstarter wrote:Re: "If you have a type of map you'd like to see, let us know!"
How well is Other World Mapper able to prepare entire planet surface maps?
(I'm told that these maps need to be 1:2 ratio to wrap correctly around a sphere.)
@David Look at the third stretch goal. We're introducing meridians and parallel's from projections other than equirectangular. With Mercator, Elliptical, Gauss conformal (maybe others) meridians and parallels it would be easier to keep track of the ratios as you try to make an entire planet surface map.
We have other features planned, but that's for other stretch goals (or later updates to the software).
So it looks like global maps are going to be supported. But, having previously seen (in the Spelljammer community) that there was an issue with TSR cartographers not being able to get poles right, I asked a bit more:
Other World Mapper wrote:David Shepheard at Kickstarter wrote:Those features sound great.
I wonder if you will be able to provide any sort of tools to help people avoid breaking the poles of spherical planets. Me and my RPG friends have found a lot of *professional* maps, that have poles that do not work.
Here is a post where a friend has faithfully copied a map of a Spelljammer world called Comporellon:
http://www.thepiazza.org.uk/bb/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3216&start=50#p48087
The island on the South Pole (called Southcap by the TSR cartographer who designed the original map) is just not going to wrap onto a sphere properly. Instead the south pole is going to look like Pac Man. (My friend at The Piazza knows this. We were going to attempt to correct the mistake later on.)
And here is another thread showing how Anna Meyer is trying to get the poles of Oerth to work properly:
http://www.thepiazza.org.uk/bb/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=12474
Thorfinn Tait (who is as well known in the Mystara community as Anna Meyer is in the Greyhawk community) actually wrote a detailed tutorial showing how he used multiple tools to avoid polar distortion, when he helped do cartography for Bruce Heard's World of Calidar project:
http://thorf13.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/thorfs-world-building-techniques_11.html
I've read through this multiple times, and get the general idea, but it is a very complex issue. I've spoken to Thorf about it on The Piazza:
http://www.thepiazza.org.uk/bb/viewtopic.php?f=85&t=11489
I think it would need to be another stretch goal, but if you could get Other World Mapper to do all the annoying spherical mathematical geometry stuff, you could maybe give OWM users some sort of "polar shift" ability, where they can work on the north and south poles, without needing to make them into long strips outside of your software. Then they could design the continents close to poles that look the shape they want them to look from above.
What do you think?
@David Are you asking for the option to have Other World Mapper take a landmass and turn it into a polar landmass (long strip)? So you could work with the "shape" you want, but then have a correct Equirectangular representation in the map? I want to make sure I understand fully before answering!
I think I might have been a bit confusing there, luckily the OWM team are uber patient and willing to talk about things.
Other World Mapper at Kickstarter wrote:David Shepheard at Kickstarter wrote:Yes. Something like that. I'm not entirely sure what the best way to do it would be, because I'm not a great cartographer (not yet anyway).
All I know is that people that are not experts often seem to not even realise that making poles for maps is difficult. And even when people do realise it is difficult, they don't seem to know how to get around the problem, unless they go use a bunch of other tools, like Thorf did. And most people can't do what Thorf does, because he has spent years studying how to make poles work.
Maybe if the data was stored normally (is that the equirectangular representation) but we were able to "move a camera" up over the top of the pole, we would be able to draw an island that looks approximately circular, but have the data stored corrrectly (to make that long strip).
From what I could tell of Thorf's technique, he went backwards and forwards, distorting data using G.Projector and then fixing errors that G.Projector dropped into his data. I think that changing the viewpoint, but not saving the data the "original way" (instead of saving it in a new projection and then bending it back to the original view) could avoid the need to fix things.
I'm not sure of the exact maths here. I realise that spheres are a bit tricky. I think this would be a fairly hard bit of programming. But I think that if you had a stretch goal to solve this problem, it could help a lot of people solve a problem that most people don't understand.
@David We have planned something like that, which would allow you to work on the poles separately, and take care of turning them into the proper Equirectangular projection, if you create your map project as an spherical world map . However, it's going to have to be a later stretch goal (or something for after the first release).
Thanks!
So I'm happy that OWM is going to deal with this weirdness, but I'm not sure if it is going to do it on Version 1.0 or somewhere a bit later down the line.
I think that generally, with things like computer games, they "cheat" and just ignore the fact that planets have poles. If you have a game like World of Warcraft, and you don't allow your players to have full access to the planet, you can pretend that a rectangular map is a spherical map, but design a map that is a cylinder...and your players are never going to know. But I think the OWM team are going to up their game and go beyond what the competition can do here.
I think it is great that you want to design a polar setting, Gareth. Because if there is going to be any sort of distortion when OWM first try to solve the polar problem, I think that someone like you could be the person who designs the map that shows that up. If it works for you, it is probably going to work for everyone.
gareth_w wrote:The only thing I can think of that might help in software is some sort of variable grid lines, so as you move toward or away from the equator the grid lines move to compensate.
As you get towards the pole, I am pretty sure that grid lines would all converge into a single point. What is meaningful near the equator is pretty meaningless within a few miles of the pole. Or maybe not meaningless, but something that needs to be interpreted in a different way.
Perhaps your setting would have grid lines that radiate out from a central point and other grid lines that are a series of circles that are equal distances from your pole. You are probably going to have a pole that is uninhabitable and deadly cold, so perhaps you might have the central area cause "cold damage" and have less and less cold damage as people cross the various circles around the pole (until you get to the stage where it is possible for people to live). There might also be a circle where things like trees can start to live.
I'm not sure how large an "Arctic Circle" should be, but on a planet with tilt, you would have a zone that has 24 hour daytime or 24 hour nighttime. And you might also have "Northern Lights" be more probable inside a specific circle. So circles on your map (instead of horizontal and vertical grid lines) could actually help with world-building).