Building a Dying Earth Hexmap

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Judging__Eagle
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Building a Dying Earth Hexmap

Post by Judging__Eagle »

Since there are no decent hexmaps of Earth, I find myself working on one for myself. Ideally towards drawing a series of increasingly detailed hexmaps. Specifically focused on areas that previous & existing Earth-based campaigns that I've already run occurred (e.g. Johannasburg, Prague, Toronto, S.W. China/Former Tibet, Former Tibet-Afghan border, E. Afghanistan, Buenos Aires).

WIP: Hex Step 1 (Probably will need to be redone b/c it doesn't line up well w/ Hex Step 2)
Image
I'll probably redo this from a new template for the hexes.

WIP: Hex Step 2 (lowest sections need to be lined up)
Image
I was lucky enough to find a PDF of the Worldbuilder's Guidebook, so that I didn't have to bemoan the mapping pad that got separated from my copy of the guidebook (also, not having to scan it is a plus); so I was able to get decent second-step hex sections to overlay on the dymaxion map I used.

The first pass is mostly to get an idea for where the grids will overlay on a dymaxion map of Earth. The next pass will be to build a hexgrid from scratch in Adobe Illustrator; instead of messing around with artifacting non-vectored images in PS.

I've also made attempts towards making hex symbols for Frank's ACKs-based Hexcrawl Terrain Types. Nothing digital yet, and the paper sketches need some revision.

Many of them I've had to make up Hex symbols for by borrowing and modifying standard cartography symbols (Mudflat, Savannah, Prairie/Grassland, Steppes, Scrubland, Glacier), or flat out making shit up (rocky soil, heath).

I've realized that "Fetid Swamp" isn't really a contemporaneously used cartographic type, and instead went for "Flooded Woods" (b/c there are about 4 types of forested/flooded marsh, and none for "rotten" wetlands in contemporary US cartography). Personal experience in seeing marshy and flooded forests either going to, or at camping sites along N.Ontario (really, N.Ontario is lousy with large tracts of flooded forests whose white skeletal trunks indicate there is little life among the bones of drowned pines, even in daylight they're spooky); also inclines me to relabel them as "forested marsh."
Last edited by Judging__Eagle on Fri Apr 28, 2017 6:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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DrPraetor
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Post by DrPraetor »

Pardon me if I'm spacing on the geometry, but shouldn't the surface of the earth be approximated by 20 triangles (like an icosahedron - a 20-sided die) and not with 22?
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Post by Mord »

DrPraetor wrote:Pardon me if I'm spacing on the geometry, but shouldn't the surface of the earth be approximated by 20 triangles (like an icosahedron - a 20-sided die) and not with 22?
Two of them are overlapped by others - it works out to 20 faces. Not sure why it was set up that way, but the geometry works.
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Post by Stahlseele »

So, each hex is how big?
Several hundred miles across?
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Post by Username17 »

Stahlseele wrote:So, each hex is how big?
Several hundred miles across?
Unless I'm counting wrong, each of those hexagons is about thirty four thousand square kilometers.

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Post by DrPraetor »

Oh, I get it.

While I appreciate the desire to keep the landmasses contiguous, I think it would be easier to follow without splitting the Australian face of the Southern Ocean, or that little chevron for southern Japan.

Or... is that what you mean about needing to line up the lowest sections?
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Post by Blicero »

How is this a dying earth hexmap? Isn't the conceit of the dying earth stories that they take place in the crazy far future where modern geography is no longer accurate?
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Post by Stahlseele »

@Frank
Thanks.

And now i find myself asking:
What good is a hexmap at that scale?
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Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Re: Building a Dying Earth Hexmap

Post by GnomeWorks »

Judging__Eagle wrote:Frank's ACKs-based Hexcrawl Terrain Types.
Can I get a link to that?
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Judging__Eagle
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

DrPraetor wrote:Pardon me if I'm spacing on the geometry, but shouldn't the surface of the earth be approximated by 20 triangles (like an icosahedron - a 20-sided die) and not with 22?
Mord wrote: Two of them are overlapped by others - it works out to 20 faces. Not sure why it was set up that way, but the geometry works.
Both good points. The base maps I've been leaning towards for planetary cartography are Buckminister-Fuller/Dymaxion Projections; and Dymaxion maps often have chevrons cutpasta'd around to keep landmasses or watermasses contiguous.
FrankTrollman wrote:
Stahlseele wrote:So, each hex is how big?
Several hundred miles across?
Unless I'm counting wrong, each of those hexagons is about thirty four thousand square kilometers.

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You're probably right (I hadn't calculated the areas initially); I've narrowed it down to a Dymaxion triangle edge being 7,048.89 km if that helps any (triangle edges have unstated irrational metric length of 7,048.89 km (unlike Cahill-Keyes facet edges of 10,000 km)).

Thanks to this I figured out that I was scaling my step 1 hexes too small. Also that the step 2 hexes sub-divide by 12 into 6 mile step 3 hexes; which themselves subdivide into hexes about the size of a Chessex mondomat for the step 4 hex; and the step 5 hex would be a 5' hex.

The idea of being able to have a consistent scaling system seems really appealing, even if the Dymaxion projection is utter trash compared to the Cahill-Keyes projection. Unfortunately, the Dymaxion projection serves better for hex-based maps; while the Cahill-Keyes maps are better for squared grid use.
Blicero wrote:How is this a dying earth hexmap? Isn't the conceit of the dying earth stories that they take place in the crazy far future where modern geography is no longer accurate?
Changing this maps tectonic overlay is something that I've been thinking about for a long time. Pretty much since I made my first planet w/ the 2e Worldbuilder's Guide.


The thing is, even Jack Vance wasn't clear how far in the future the timeline was. The only real evidence that the world geography isn't far enough changed that that is a single location (the Scamander River) in the narration of Cudgel the Clever's later leg of his voyages in Lens of the Overworld.

The problem with the Scamander leg of the trek from LotOW is that it feels far too long for what seem like a sub 20km distance (at least a couple of days pass in the narrative). So Vance might have simply been inadvertedly poaching the Illiad for riverine nomeclature, and DE's Scamander is an continental watershed river like the Yang Ze or the Nile. Alternately, he may have thought that the Scamander from the Illiad was a much longer river than it is.

Right now I'm focusing on being able to make a hexmap of Earth. Making it more post-post-apocalyptic will involve of overlaying existing dymaxion maps of infrastructure, population centres, biomes, and human migration from my hewworld folder. The case Gene Keys makes for Dymaxion maps having high distortion has proven to be somewhat true, lower quality maps tend to be more distorted.
Stahlseele wrote:@Frank
Thanks.

And now i find myself asking:
What good is a hexmap at that scale?
Really useful if the campaign involves intercontinental travel more than once a play session, you like to use gridded paper for calculating combat, and travel across hundreds of miles can occur by air or land craft in narrative seconds.

(Un)fortunately, the largest high definition satellite image has 2km pixels, which means that the "world map" can support "some mile" hexes at its smallest resolution. Now 4x4 pixels is going to be tiny, but 6 mile hexes on a "world" map is certainly going to make integration with more detailed hex steps in sub-maps a bit easier.
Last edited by Judging__Eagle on Sun Apr 30, 2017 4:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Building a Dying Earth Hexmap

Post by Judging__Eagle »

GnomeWorks wrote:
Judging__Eagle wrote:Frank's ACKs-based Hexcrawl Terrain Types.
Can I get a link to that?
here

Sorry I didn't put one at the start.

I've also begun simple sketches for boxy pixelated versions of the various people that can be employed that Frank also listed in that post (Artisan leaves me w/ a bit of a blank; hunter I drew two types of, and after Potter there's about 9 more to go before the military units need sketches).
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Update:

I've slowly cobbled together the Blue Marble files. I could use jpegs instead of pngs, but then it would be prone to artifacts.

A quick workspace screencap; the actual file was ~2.09 Gb, so don't let that 999.X Mb "file size" fool you.
Image
A slow render of the image, resized by facebook's album uploader.
Image
At the very least ~6mile areas can be visiblely marked out with vector polygons as the base hex.
Image
Each "dot" marks off a ~6mile area. Between 4-5 (4.8) 2km pixels are needed for a 6mile hex. So there's some fudging at the global scale.

I'm also rethinking my global map. Distorting the NASA orbital photos will do more harm than good, and this "north in the middle" layout seems somehow more clear to understand the "connecting" map edges; but the other side is that they're distorted as it is, and have to be resized uniformly.
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