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hexagram30 / map

A map-making library for worlds, cities, dungeons, and buildings in hexagram30 projects
Apache License 2.0
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Re-think usefulness of map image resolution #1

Closed oubiwann closed 4 years ago

oubiwann commented 6 years ago

Some initial images have been added , Resolution was arbitrarily set to 1600x1020. These notes are in the config file:

   :pixels {
     ;; With these values, one pixel is approximately the area of a city
     ;; whose size is between that of Chicago and El Paso, ~ 626 km^2.
     ;;
     ;; Walking for two pixels is approximately the same distance as walking
     ;; the length of the Chunnel (between England and France), or 50 km.
     ;;
     ;; Note that the average size of a medieval "city" was ~ 2.6 km^2. As
     ;; such, in one pixel you could fix 100 medieval cities. Which, of
     ;; course is absurd ;-) But! If one uses the oft-quoted measure of
     ;; placing cities a distance that can be walked, there and back, in one
     ;; day, one pixel can hold, for example, one whole city (10 mile radius),
     ;; two halves of two cities, and one quarter of another city.
     :x 1600
     :y 1020}

Which, of course, begs the question: what is a good resolution, really? How granular do we need to get? Things to consider:

Tasks:

oubiwann commented 6 years ago

We're also going to be putting the pixel data into a Redis instance, so we need to think about data size and querying times ...

If we keep things as they are, we have 1600x1020 = 1,632,000 entries.

If we make it so that walking a pixel takes half a day, we'll have 5000x3188 = 15,940,000 entries.

If we make it so that a medieval city is contained in one pixel, we'll have 15395x9814 = 151,086,530 entities.

Wow. Very interesting these these three scales are essentially successive bumps in order of magnitude ...

It would be fun to do some test cases with actual data in Redis.

oubiwann commented 6 years ago

Playing around with units and sizes:

Conversions:

oubiwann commented 5 years ago

Hrm, just read something that said the average adult human walks 3 miles in two hours, so I'm not sure why I wrote the above? Maybe I was thinking a human carrying gear/packs? Not an unladen human? ("It's not a matter of where 'e grips it!").

Walking unladen:

I like the idea of standardizing on leagues :-)

In a day, a healthy unladen human can walk 20-30 miles in 8 hours. Let's just call that a really healthy person can walk 10 leagues/day:

D&D thoughts on the matter:

I'd say that laden, that'd be equivalent to difficult terrain and thus distance/time halved:

oubiwann commented 5 years ago

Now, back to world size and pixel size ... trying to get a sense of how much unknown territory can be explored for a given/standard map resolution.

A city

If we say that instead of 2.6 km (referring to the code comment from this ticket's description) on a side, an average medieval "city" was (/ 5.556 2) = 2.778 km on a side, then we have:

Walking for a day

A planet

Pixel

As a day?

As a half-day?

As two hours?

As an hour?

oubiwann commented 5 years ago

If we have 4 leagues as a good average distance between cities or major towns (this lets you walk there, spend a couple hours, and walk back), then:

Then, for each of the following pixel setups above, we'd have an actual number of possible/average cities per pixel as:

oubiwann commented 4 years ago

Looking again at the original 1600 pixel width ...

That's:

oubiwann commented 4 years ago

Okay, staying with 1600 pixels sounds good to me. That makes traversing a pixel about half a day's journey, and that leaves lots of room for jazz/improvisation.

oubiwann commented 4 years ago

Documented in 0e15be0 and c1f9ca8; closing.