Something About Maps

Sure.

For the Moon the (images) data seems to be bucketed with regard to pixels-per-degree (PPD), the more coarse data set being 64ppd data (finer resolution for the Moon goes at least as high as 512ppd that I have found). Sadly, my workflow (image editors, and Blender as you mentioned) are already straining with the 64ppd data-set so I did not try to go higher resolution. It means though that my Moon is wildly small — the lunar bases that seem to be a paltry 7x7 or 9x9 voxels are in fact the size of a small town.

I began with NASA's "CGI Moon Kit" [1] which, as I say, is 64ppd. There is both a "color data" image and an "elevation data" image (where the greyscale value of the image represents elevation). Polar data was garbage (and would look wildly distorted in my tile-based voxel algorithm so I confess that I tossed it — cropped everything outside 60-degrees latitude basically - I just limit fuel in the game to keep pesky kids from trying to get too deep into the polar regions).

Even at 64ppd and poles cropped, I still ended up with two images that were 23040 × 11264 pixels in size. This turned out to be a challenge for most of the image editing apps I have. Blender handled it (but barely).

With both color + elevation images I followed an online tutorial [2] meant for cartographers wanting to use Blender for relief shading. NASA's moon map had no shadows (probably a good thing). I was not going to try to real-time shade/light the voxel terrain so I settled on "burning…

I think there is something important that we lose when we increase the accuracy of a representation at the expense of the elegance of the representation. Illustrations to photographs is a great example here, but another one is in maps.

I don't know if anyone here ever used this, but there used to be a system called LineDrive [1] that would give you "napkin" directions instead of overlaying the directions on a map. It used to be on Microsoft's MapPoint but apparently decomissioned [2].

This was most useful in the time when you would print out directions instead of getting them dynamically, but I feel like there's still a place for it -- I don't need to necessarily know the details of every twist and turn in the road so much as a schematic overview, even when getting turn-by-turn directions. It would be great to see this revived in some way, because I think the representative maps are much more clear for most use cases.

[1] http://vis.berkeley.edu/papers/rtmaps/

[2] https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/remembering-linedrive/

This reminds me of a Bing (MSN?) maps plug-in a while ago that was built by, I think, an Indian guy who went over to MS, which would plot a summarized route map from point A to point B where the main roads in your route were labeled, esp where you had to turn or get on a diff road. This was before phones with GPS came about.

The roads looked somehwat like chicken scratch (straight, not many curves). Like if you were mapping directions in sand/dirt with a stick in explaining to someone how to get some place.

Ah, yes, it was Linedrive: https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/remembering-linedrive/

Reminds me of LineDrive [1], a feature of MapBlast that would give you directions in something that looked like how a human would write out directions, where roads were simplified. The overall result is reducing a map to only the parts that are important to someone that needs directions along a specific route.

A bit of a moot point in today's world where everyone has a GPS enabled device capable of giving them turn-by-turn directions interactively.

[1] https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/remembering-linedrive/

The author Daniel Huffman's story is quite compelling and inspiring:

https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/about/

The long version is even better:

https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/on-salvation/