The R-QBAM main thread
- Thread starter Tanystropheus42
- Start date
So, uh, sorry for the long wait.
This project isn't dead, it just had to go into hibernation for a few months due to RL issues, which I'll try to explain below.
Long story short, back in December I got burnt out working on the Caribbean (as documented previously). I tried to get around that by moving on to something different. Unfortunately, the something different I chose was Antarctica. Now, I've already traced the Antarctic coastline per the resized 8K-BAM I'm using as a reference, but I wanted to add ice cover (in the case of Antarctica, that's more like adding any land that's not under a kilometer of ice) and permanent ice shelves. That project hit a brick wall when I found a good dataset but couldn't for the life of me figure out how to work with QGIS. That made the burnout worse, and in the end I just stopped trying.
Real life got in the way through January, and to avoid burnout again I decided to start work on a new continent entirely from a clean slate. Then just when I was getting started on Europe in earnest in mid-February my laptop broke. Knocked the thing off a table and it just died, as in, wouldn't boot up or hold charge at all, which was fun. Fortunately the hard-drive was fine, so I was able to recover what I'd done so far (most of Portugal and the Balearics), but with my main laptop out of action I had to use my half-broken crappy backup instead for a few weeks.
The backup laptop is terrible. Old, slow with a battery that can't hold more than ten minutes of charge and with a charger that has an annoying habit of falling out with the slightest of nudges which is a fun combination. Oh, and the screen's cracked, with a massive blob of dead pixels in the bottom right corner. And did I mention that the drive is nearly full, and that it doesn't have paint.net installed, and that trying to get that to work would have been too much of a hassle on such a broken old machine?
Needless to say, I got nothing done while I had to use that worthless piece of junk as my main laptop. Two weeks ago I got a new laptop, and after a week or so slowly setting things up and getting used to it (installing programs, transferring files, configuring settings, ect, ect), I was finally able to get started on this again.
Apologies for not mentioning any of this. I have a bad habit of forgetting, or putting off then forgetting to reply to things like this. As I said, work on Europe will continue slowly from now on.
While Iberia itself is done, there are several associated bits and bobs that I haven't gotten round to finishing yet, so I'll include them tomorrow. I also wasn't entirely sure how to best show Spain's ... weird constitutional setup. As I understand it, it's basically a federation trying to pretend to be a unitary state, where every first-level administrative division has autonomy. What you see on the map is my best attempt at showing that, though it can definitely be improved. With that aside, on with ...
Patch 8 - Iberia;
- Added mainland Portugal, plus Madeira and the Savage Islands (the Azores will be added tomorrow).
- Added Mainland Spain, plus the Balearics and Ceuta (again, I'll add the Canary Islands and Melilla tomorrow as well).
- Added Andorra.
- Added Gibraltar (too small to get a pixel, I outlined it instead).
This project isn't dead, it just had to go into hibernation for a few months due to RL issues, which I'll try to explain below.
Long story short, back in December I got burnt out working on the Caribbean (as documented previously). I tried to get around that by moving on to something different. Unfortunately, the something different I chose was Antarctica. Now, I've already traced the Antarctic coastline per the resized 8K-BAM I'm using as a reference, but I wanted to add ice cover (in the case of Antarctica, that's more like adding any land that's not under a kilometer of ice) and permanent ice shelves. That project hit a brick wall when I found a good dataset but couldn't for the life of me figure out how to work with QGIS. That made the burnout worse, and in the end I just stopped trying.
Real life got in the way through January, and to avoid burnout again I decided to start work on a new continent entirely from a clean slate. Then just when I was getting started on Europe in earnest in mid-February my laptop broke. Knocked the thing off a table and it just died, as in, wouldn't boot up or hold charge at all, which was fun. Fortunately the hard-drive was fine, so I was able to recover what I'd done so far (most of Portugal and the Balearics), but with my main laptop out of action I had to use my half-broken crappy backup instead for a few weeks.
The backup laptop is terrible. Old, slow with a battery that can't hold more than ten minutes of charge and with a charger that has an annoying habit of falling out with the slightest of nudges which is a fun combination. Oh, and the screen's cracked, with a massive blob of dead pixels in the bottom right corner. And did I mention that the drive is nearly full, and that it doesn't have paint.net installed, and that trying to get that to work would have been too much of a hassle on such a broken old machine?
Needless to say, I got nothing done while I had to use that worthless piece of junk as my main laptop. Two weeks ago I got a new laptop, and after a week or so slowly setting things up and getting used to it (installing programs, transferring files, configuring settings, ect, ect), I was finally able to get started on this again.
Apologies for not mentioning any of this. I have a bad habit of forgetting, or putting off then forgetting to reply to things like this. As I said, work on Europe will continue slowly from now on.
While Iberia itself is done, there are several associated bits and bobs that I haven't gotten round to finishing yet, so I'll include them tomorrow. I also wasn't entirely sure how to best show Spain's ... weird constitutional setup. As I understand it, it's basically a federation trying to pretend to be a unitary state, where every first-level administrative division has autonomy. What you see on the map is my best attempt at showing that, though it can definitely be improved. With that aside, on with ...
Patch 8 - Iberia;
- Added mainland Portugal, plus Madeira and the Savage Islands (the Azores will be added tomorrow).
- Added Mainland Spain, plus the Balearics and Ceuta (again, I'll add the Canary Islands and Melilla tomorrow as well).
- Added Andorra.
- Added Gibraltar (too small to get a pixel, I outlined it instead).
I suppose it is due to the political organisation, with every territory being autonomous.
Spaniard here. Basically, our State functions as a Federal State would, with every Community having its own Parliament and (a limited) set of laws, which are at the same time subordinated to the central government and laws. But, still, we are a unitary state, just that a decentralized one. And so, I do believe mapping it the same way as you might do with the US, without unnecesary outlines and stuff, should be the best way to portray it.
Small update today.
I've modded Spain a fair amount to try and make yesterday's provisional colour scheme clearer, mostly by inverting which colour is used as the main one and which as the outline. I think it looks cleaner, so I'll stick with it for now. On to some quick replies.
What Drex said. Also, see my explanation in the original post.
But the thing is, it isn't officially a federation. I'm trying to distinguish that Spain is a de-facto federation, as opposed to, say, the United states that is an official one, hence why I've used an ... unusual way of mapping things. As I mentioned above however I think my new way of showing things is an improvement, so hopefully that addresses any concerns.
Patch 9 - Macaronesia;
- Inverted Spain colours for a better aesthetic and changed first level administrative division colour.
- Added the Azores.
- Added the Canary Islands .
- Added Melilla and most of Morocco's Mediterranean coast.
I've modded Spain a fair amount to try and make yesterday's provisional colour scheme clearer, mostly by inverting which colour is used as the main one and which as the outline. I think it looks cleaner, so I'll stick with it for now. On to some quick replies.
What Drex said. Also, see my explanation in the original post.
But the thing is, it isn't officially a federation. I'm trying to distinguish that Spain is a de-facto federation, as opposed to, say, the United states that is an official one, hence why I've used an ... unusual way of mapping things. As I mentioned above however I think my new way of showing things is an improvement, so hopefully that addresses any concerns.
Patch 9 - Macaronesia;
- Inverted Spain colours for a better aesthetic and changed first level administrative division colour.
- Added the Azores.
- Added the Canary Islands .
- Added Melilla and most of Morocco's Mediterranean coast.
I can be quite impulsive at times.
My original plan was to do France next, or maybe Morocco. However, having noticed that it is indeed st Patrick's day, I decided the Ireland would be more fitting.
Patch 10 - Ireland;
- Added the Republic of Ireland in its entirety (well, discounting the Irish Claim to Rockall Bank - that will show up later)
- Added Northern Ireland.
My original plan was to do France next, or maybe Morocco. However, having noticed that it is indeed st Patrick's day, I decided the Ireland would be more fitting.
Patch 10 - Ireland;
- Added the Republic of Ireland in its entirety (well, discounting the Irish Claim to Rockall Bank - that will show up later)
- Added Northern Ireland.
glad to see you're back again.
question: can you tell us a bit about the details of the projection you used?
we know it's robinson but knowing the offset and the full world resolution would be real useful.
Yup, and England and Wales will be the next update (I'm leaving Scotland for a little while because damn the Scottish Islands). Scotland will be done soon, but I want to get a few more 'easy' areas done before facing another fractal coastline.
Thanks for the kind words.
The projection is Robinson, scaled so that the distance from one side of the map to the other along the equator is exactly 4974 pixels, the same as the old QBAM. The R-QBAM is thus just as wide as the QBAM but a smidge taller.
The reason why I picked that specific width is actually pretty interesting. About this time last year I decided to try and produce good, QBAM-scale topographic maps of the planets of the inner solar system in Robinson. The way I eventually figured out to scale everything correctly relative to the Earth was to take the equatorial distance in pixels as a proxy for equatorial circumference, then scale the other maps based on that using some basic maths. It was the only consistent measure of planetary size I could think of to measure, considering the distortions introduced by map projections warp almost everything except the equator.
When starting the R-QBAM project, I didn't want to invalidate my old WIP interplanetary maps, so I scaled the new R-QBAM so that it perfectly matched the last metric I had used to scale them. I never finished those maps (Mercury, Venus, the Moon and Mars), however I am planning on finishing them later when this project is done.
Tangent aside, on with ...
Patch 11 - France;
- Added Metropolitan France (excluding Corsica).
- Added Monaco (the joys of single-pixel micronations).
- Added the Bailiwick of Jersey and the Bailiwick of Guernsey, colourised UK protectorate pink (because let's be honest, the crown dependencies basically are protectorates, even though it's not official). Border added in 'first-level admin division' grey to distinguish the two.
Next up, England and Wales, then the Low Countries, followed by slowly grinding through Germany a few states at a time.
I know that it is robinson, but I also want to know the East/West offset of the map, since that'll be useful for when people eventually start to make things for your map.
Just in case, the E/W offset means that you use a different prime meridian other than greenwich.
That's the best alternative imo to convert distances to maps. It can also be done with the height of the map and the polar cincunference of the planet split by two, althought that division makes it slighly more inaccurate. By the way, it is also possible to know areas with such maps if they are spheres so you can get an approximation of the area of the average (aka ideal, probably doesn't happen anywhere on the map) pixel area, which is however useful when dealing with things on the borderline between being represented and not.
Damn, I knew I forgot to mention something. The R-QBAM is centered on the 10th meridian east, as it means the edge of the map cuts almost exactly through the Bering Strait. Now there are about six pixels of Russia's Chukchi peninsula stuck on the US side of the map, but I decided it was easier to stick with the round-numbered 10th meridian rather than fiddle around with the smaller increments that would be needed to perfectly thread the needle through the Straits.
Second point. Due to the very-much-current-politics war going on in Eastern Europe right now and considering the changing facts on the ground, I'll be setting the date for this map as January 1st 2022, before any of that kicked off.
That's what I thought, thanks for the corroboration.
Patch 12 - England and Wales
- Added England.
- Added Wales showing limited local autonomy.
- Added the Isle of Man.
Patch 13 - Benelux
- Added Luxembourg.
- Added Belgium (showing the tripartite federation between Wallonia, Flanders and Brussels).
- Added the Netherlands.
- Added a tiny section of Germany; the East Frisian islands of Borkum and Juist.
For some reason I'm not entirely happy with the Netherlands, and in particular the Ijisselmeer. I may have tweaked it a little by the time the next update comes out. As for the next update, I'll probably start on Germany, however there's a decent chance I'll try and get Scotland done at some point in the near future, so plans could change.
- Added Luxembourg.
- Added Belgium (showing the tripartite federation between Wallonia, Flanders and Brussels).
- Added the Netherlands.
- Added a tiny section of Germany; the East Frisian islands of Borkum and Juist.
For some reason I'm not entirely happy with the Netherlands, and in particular the Ijisselmeer. I may have tweaked it a little by the time the next update comes out. As for the next update, I'll probably start on Germany, however there's a decent chance I'll try and get Scotland done at some point in the near future, so plans could change.
Small patch today. Was going to start on Germany, but instead felt like doing more work in the Mediterranean, and this was the result.
Patch 14 - Western Tyrrhenian Islands.
- Added Corsica.
- Added Sardinia.
(I still haven't gotten around to changing the Netherlands, and I'm still not entirely happy with it. Watch this space.)
Patch 14 - Western Tyrrhenian Islands.
- Added Corsica.
- Added Sardinia.
(I still haven't gotten around to changing the Netherlands, and I'm still not entirely happy with it. Watch this space.)
We can probably begin making patches starting with the USA provinces, with the CSA being the easiest to implement.
Nice to see people working off what I've done so far. A blank map is a good place to start, although looking at that makes me realise that I may have been a bit too generous adding small lakes in the US (and to a lesser extent, Iberia). I'll definitely have to go over that at some point.
As for today's update, Germany is proving more complex than expected and thus taking longer than I thought it would. Nevertheless, I was able to make a few single-pixel patches in the Netherlands (I'm still not happy, but it'll do), and finish four states in Western Germany along the Middle Rhine. With any luck, I'll get the north German coast done either tomorrow or the day after.
And yes, I know the inter-state borders barely show up in the colours I'm using, I just can't be bothered changing it for now.
Patch 15 - the Rhinelands
- Added North Rhine-Westphalia.
- Added Rhineland-Palatinate.
- Added Saarland.
- Added Hesse.
Germany continues to be annoying, so much so that this patch took two days cumulatively to complete. Damn coastlines. But anyway, another decent chunk of Germany is done, in addition to two small islands owned by Denmark and Poland that I sort of had to fill out as well. So here's ...
Patch 16 - North German coast;
- Added Lower Saxony.
- Added Bremen.
- Added Hamburg.
- Added Schleswig-Holstein.
- Added Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
- Added Berlin, because it was easy and small and I was annoyed with Mecklenburg in general and wanted something easy to do.
- Added the Danish island of Rømø.
- Added the Polish island of Wolin.
Patch 16 - North German coast;
- Added Lower Saxony.
- Added Bremen.
- Added Hamburg.
- Added Schleswig-Holstein.
- Added Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
- Added Berlin, because it was easy and small and I was annoyed with Mecklenburg in general and wanted something easy to do.
- Added the Danish island of Rømø.
- Added the Polish island of Wolin.
Aaaand it's done. Finally. Germany is finally done.
Patch 17 - South+East Germany
- Added Brandenburg.
- Added Saxony-Anhalt.
- Added Thuringia.
- Added Saxony.
- Added Bavaria.
- Added Baden-Wurttemberg.
Next up, either Scotland or Switzerland. So a choice between a horrendous coastline or many, many tiny mountain cantons. Either way, the next update may take two or three days to finish.
Patch 17 - South+East Germany
- Added Brandenburg.
- Added Saxony-Anhalt.
- Added Thuringia.
- Added Saxony.
- Added Bavaria.
- Added Baden-Wurttemberg.
Next up, either Scotland or Switzerland. So a choice between a horrendous coastline or many, many tiny mountain cantons. Either way, the next update may take two or three days to finish.