The R-QBAM main thread
- Thread starter Tanystropheus42
- Start date
So I assume the next logical step is to redraw the tehsils for each of the presidencies/provinces?
I think the Raj patch is done for now. Further details could be added for some of the larger geographic units. But when dealing with the pixel resolution of the Q-Bam it quickly becomes less helpful and informative and instead becomes a mess.
I want to see a completed R-QBam. Once that is finished we can as a community modify our maps to the new standard. For me that is the next step.
After the cartographic hell that was Quebec and Labrador, Ontario went unnervingly easily. That's not to say it was a completely painless job, with the fractal lakes to the north of the Lake of the Woods being particularly fiendish, but for a variety of reasons things progressed much quicker than the last time I had to deal with Canada. In no particular order, I had already done a decent chunk of Ontario that just needed some quick double-checking and tweaking, there was no Norway-tier fractal coastline like the Labrador coast to deal with, much of northern Ontario is one massive swamp with comparatively few lakes, and Ontario is just a smaller area to map. All of that meant I was able to finish Ontario in a little over a week (comparable to previous problem areas like Bangladesh and the Scandinavian states), compared to the over three weeks it took to finish Quebec and Labrador. In hindsight, I really should've broken Quebec up into more reasonably sized chunks, but oh well, you live and you learn.
I've also bundled in hopefully the final major overhaul to North America south of Canada, the long-promised culling of superfluous lakes. Me being me, I also took the opportunity to tweak a few lakes and coastlines here and there, although I also stumbled on a rather embarrassing cock-up. At some point not too long after I added Washington State back in December 2021, I made a few tweaks to the coast of Puget Sound in the unpublished master-R-QBAM I do most work on, then apparently forgot to include them in any published patches. The screw-up went unnoticed for as long as it did as I haven't really done much work on North America over the past two years. Very annoyingly, I can remember spotting the problem when compiling the last major overhaul of North America back in October 2022, but I assumed it was a problem with the master-map and moved on without making any changes (although fortunately I was too lazy to bring the main map in-line with the flawed patches).
This time however I spotted the problem, but instead of brushing it away like last time I did some double-checking and realised I screwed up. Of course, the 'improved' patch wasn't entirely to my liking, so I ended up producing a bespoke new patch for the area, but at least it's fixed now.
By my back-of-the-envelope maths, finishing Ontario puts me about a third of the way through Canada, which is good to know - I still have a lot of work to do, but I've put a decent dent in the total. Nothing to do but to keep up the grind, but it's nice to see progress being made, however slowly. For the next patch however I'll be taking a break from Canada to get started on South America, most likely with Venezuela and Colombia. After that, Manitoba, then the Guyanas and a chunk of the Amazon basin, followed by Saskatchewan.
One final note, I wanted to fit some replies in this post as well, but I've spent long enough today finishing then checking and double-checking the patch, so I think I'll leave that for tomorrow. In the meantime ...
Patch 94 - Oh, Canada 3 (Ontario);
- Added the rest of Ontario, finishing the province.
- Removed a tonne of probably superfluous lakes throughout North America, to bring the rest of the continent in-line with Canada.
- Related to the above, tweaked a tonne of existing lakes and coastlines in the same area, most notably patching a long-running oversight in Washington State.
- Finished the final round of Raj-based tweaks to India (specifically, adopting a better border in the Demchok sector based on this map).
I've also bundled in hopefully the final major overhaul to North America south of Canada, the long-promised culling of superfluous lakes. Me being me, I also took the opportunity to tweak a few lakes and coastlines here and there, although I also stumbled on a rather embarrassing cock-up. At some point not too long after I added Washington State back in December 2021, I made a few tweaks to the coast of Puget Sound in the unpublished master-R-QBAM I do most work on, then apparently forgot to include them in any published patches. The screw-up went unnoticed for as long as it did as I haven't really done much work on North America over the past two years. Very annoyingly, I can remember spotting the problem when compiling the last major overhaul of North America back in October 2022, but I assumed it was a problem with the master-map and moved on without making any changes (although fortunately I was too lazy to bring the main map in-line with the flawed patches).
This time however I spotted the problem, but instead of brushing it away like last time I did some double-checking and realised I screwed up. Of course, the 'improved' patch wasn't entirely to my liking, so I ended up producing a bespoke new patch for the area, but at least it's fixed now.
By my back-of-the-envelope maths, finishing Ontario puts me about a third of the way through Canada, which is good to know - I still have a lot of work to do, but I've put a decent dent in the total. Nothing to do but to keep up the grind, but it's nice to see progress being made, however slowly. For the next patch however I'll be taking a break from Canada to get started on South America, most likely with Venezuela and Colombia. After that, Manitoba, then the Guyanas and a chunk of the Amazon basin, followed by Saskatchewan.
One final note, I wanted to fit some replies in this post as well, but I've spent long enough today finishing then checking and double-checking the patch, so I think I'll leave that for tomorrow. In the meantime ...
Patch 94 - Oh, Canada 3 (Ontario);
- Added the rest of Ontario, finishing the province.
- Removed a tonne of probably superfluous lakes throughout North America, to bring the rest of the continent in-line with Canada.
- Related to the above, tweaked a tonne of existing lakes and coastlines in the same area, most notably patching a long-running oversight in Washington State.
- Finished the final round of Raj-based tweaks to India (specifically, adopting a better border in the Demchok sector based on this map).
And with that we can now properly map Upper and Lower Canada, I guess. We just need some updates to the rivers and find the river basin borders.
What software can I use to reproject maps? I'd like to contribute, and GProjector can't take 8K-BAM maps.
On the de-facto map side, some changes have happened. The Tigray War has ended, and a new war in the Amhara state has begun, and now there's a new civil war in the Sudan. There have also been some minor territorial changes across the CAR as well.
Yeah there's gonna be tons of updates if one wants to try to modernize it to ~September 2023.
This map is if I remember correctly set on January 1st 2022.
Generally any full-map historical patches and updates will probably happen once the whole map is done. January 1st 2023 should be the first one, though by whenever that'll be maybe January 1st 2024 as well.
I wanted to get this patch done much quicker than it ended up taking, however RL got in the way and it proved fiddlier than I expected. While Colombia and the Venezuelan coast threw up a few problems (I'm still not entirely happy with the Paria Peninsula, in spite of much tweaking), the main problem was the Venezuelan internal borders. I'm showing the first level divisions here as Venezuela is federal, and I expected this to be a relatively easy job that wouldn't take too long.
However, if you actually look at maps, while they agree on most of the borders, there is a shocking level of variation in the state borders in some regions, in particular the area around the Venezuelan Andes near the border with Colombia. Google maps says one thing, openstreetmap another, wikipedia something different again. Hell, some wikipedia articles show maps with different borders in the same article. The states of Lara, Trujillo, Zulia, Merida and Barinas were by far the worst offenders for this, though that's not to say that other states weren't affected as well, just to a lesser extent.
While this held me up considerably for quite a while as I tried to figure it out, everything fell into place when I found this 1994 map of Lara state buried deep in the bowels of wikimedia. While it agrees with the borders that are shown consistently across sources, it also shows a tonne of peripheral areas marked "ZONA EN DISCUSION", which I assume means those territories were disputed between multiple states (hence, 'under discussion'). Other maps from that series can also be found on wikimedia here, and comparing the maps for the uncertain states reveals that most of the border discrepancies between maps are explained if you assume those disputed territories either changed hands or were otherwise treated differently between the sources.
I know these territories were disputed as late as the 90's, and I suspect the problem is either currently outstanding or was only solved recently. In the former case, different mapping services resolve the problem in different ways, allotting the disputed territories to different states hence accounting for the discrepancies. If the latter case is true, then I assume that some recources were made before the issue was solved and then were never updated to account for the new borders, leading to misalignment between older and more recent sources. Annoyingly, its basically impossible to research Venezuelan inter-state border disputes as googling for some variation of that search term brings back a tonne of articles on Venezuela's high-profile border dispute with Guyana, so as of now I can neither confirm nor deny either of the above guesses (though I suspect these disputes are indeed still a thing). I am however confident that the presence of disputed territories explains the odd borders.
For the R-QBAM, I ended up settling on the borders as shown by openstreetmap (with a few minor alterations), largely as those borders are also the default first-level admin borders used in NASA's Worldviewer, an interactive tool with multiple overlays that I've been using extensively as a primary source for the last few months.
As I said, much more annoying than I expected it to be, but it's done now, so I can move on to Manitoba and get working on Canada again.
Patch 95 - Colombia & Venezuela;
- Mildly tweaked Trinidad
- Added Colombia
- Added Venezuela
However, if you actually look at maps, while they agree on most of the borders, there is a shocking level of variation in the state borders in some regions, in particular the area around the Venezuelan Andes near the border with Colombia. Google maps says one thing, openstreetmap another, wikipedia something different again. Hell, some wikipedia articles show maps with different borders in the same article. The states of Lara, Trujillo, Zulia, Merida and Barinas were by far the worst offenders for this, though that's not to say that other states weren't affected as well, just to a lesser extent.
While this held me up considerably for quite a while as I tried to figure it out, everything fell into place when I found this 1994 map of Lara state buried deep in the bowels of wikimedia. While it agrees with the borders that are shown consistently across sources, it also shows a tonne of peripheral areas marked "ZONA EN DISCUSION", which I assume means those territories were disputed between multiple states (hence, 'under discussion'). Other maps from that series can also be found on wikimedia here, and comparing the maps for the uncertain states reveals that most of the border discrepancies between maps are explained if you assume those disputed territories either changed hands or were otherwise treated differently between the sources.
I know these territories were disputed as late as the 90's, and I suspect the problem is either currently outstanding or was only solved recently. In the former case, different mapping services resolve the problem in different ways, allotting the disputed territories to different states hence accounting for the discrepancies. If the latter case is true, then I assume that some recources were made before the issue was solved and then were never updated to account for the new borders, leading to misalignment between older and more recent sources. Annoyingly, its basically impossible to research Venezuelan inter-state border disputes as googling for some variation of that search term brings back a tonne of articles on Venezuela's high-profile border dispute with Guyana, so as of now I can neither confirm nor deny either of the above guesses (though I suspect these disputes are indeed still a thing). I am however confident that the presence of disputed territories explains the odd borders.
For the R-QBAM, I ended up settling on the borders as shown by openstreetmap (with a few minor alterations), largely as those borders are also the default first-level admin borders used in NASA's Worldviewer, an interactive tool with multiple overlays that I've been using extensively as a primary source for the last few months.
As I said, much more annoying than I expected it to be, but it's done now, so I can move on to Manitoba and get working on Canada again.
Patch 95 - Colombia & Venezuela;
- Mildly tweaked Trinidad
- Added Colombia
- Added Venezuela
For once, RL threw me a curveball that meant I had more time to work on the R-QBAM, not less, so I got Manitoba done a little quicker than I expected to. Aside from that, nothing much to say really. While it continues to be painful, I think I'm finally getting the hang of mapping the horrible fractal Canadian lakes, which is probably a good thing.
Next up, I'll be taking another break from Canada to continue South America, with the next patch adding the Guyanas and a good chunk of the Brazilian Amazon. After that Saskatchewan, and then I think I'll jump straight into finishing Alberta, as I feel those two provinces are probably the easiest two I have left, so why not do them back-to-back. Once I've done Alberta, I'll add another decent chunk of Brazil, then another major patch adding British Columbia and the Alaska panhandle.
Patch 96 - Oh, Canada 4 (Manitoba);
- Added Manitoba
Next up, I'll be taking another break from Canada to continue South America, with the next patch adding the Guyanas and a good chunk of the Brazilian Amazon. After that Saskatchewan, and then I think I'll jump straight into finishing Alberta, as I feel those two provinces are probably the easiest two I have left, so why not do them back-to-back. Once I've done Alberta, I'll add another decent chunk of Brazil, then another major patch adding British Columbia and the Alaska panhandle.
Patch 96 - Oh, Canada 4 (Manitoba);
- Added Manitoba
I wanted to write a little thing about the Northwestern part of the Raj as I did quite a lot of reading on it as part of some project I am working on.
There exists "Military Report and Gazetteer of Gilgit Agency and Independent Territories of Tangir and Darel", "Military Report on Dir, Swat, and Bajaur" and "Military Report and Gazetteer on Chitral" which describe their respective regions' circumstance very well. That part labeled "Gilgit Wazarat" or whatever in one map was in an interesting position - despite being part of the Gilgit agency, it was administered by a Dogra administrator and was composed of two parts - Gilgit proper and Astore. This would make it probably the only zone in the world to be a part of 4 different political jurisdictions - first it belongs to the the Raj, then Kashmir, then the British-administered Gilgit Agency, and then again to the Dogra administration.
Nevertheless, great writeup! I never knew about the 1939 Memoranda or those scans of the Survey of Inda, it looks to be very useful for my work.
It is a bit sad that you confine yourself to such a small-scale format though. Imagine how detailed a map of the Raj could truly be if only you used a bigger base map.
There exists "Military Report and Gazetteer of Gilgit Agency and Independent Territories of Tangir and Darel", "Military Report on Dir, Swat, and Bajaur" and "Military Report and Gazetteer on Chitral" which describe their respective regions' circumstance very well. That part labeled "Gilgit Wazarat" or whatever in one map was in an interesting position - despite being part of the Gilgit agency, it was administered by a Dogra administrator and was composed of two parts - Gilgit proper and Astore. This would make it probably the only zone in the world to be a part of 4 different political jurisdictions - first it belongs to the the Raj, then Kashmir, then the British-administered Gilgit Agency, and then again to the Dogra administration.
Nevertheless, great writeup! I never knew about the 1939 Memoranda or those scans of the Survey of Inda, it looks to be very useful for my work.
It is a bit sad that you confine yourself to such a small-scale format though. Imagine how detailed a map of the Raj could truly be if only you used a bigger base map.
Nothing specific - I am sure that one could make a map specifically for the Raj region that would work much better than the scale of R-BAM.
Well I'm interested in the scale you have in mind. I used to use a bassmap that was 4474x2170 and it didn't cause any problems with my computer but that was a decade ago so I don't know what to think in regards to how many pixels a basemap could comfortably be sized today.
Last edited:
Alex Richards
Donor
For the record, I have a pretty beefy laptop but the stiched-together VT-BAM of Eurasia is enough to make that struggle with just loading the image over in that thread. Might be alright with just the Raj though.
As with last time, a smaller patch I didn't think would take too long ended up dragging on a little. To be honest, I think I'm just taking the generally easier South America patches a little slower to put off jumping back into Canada (and can you really blame me?). That the Amazon river is fairly tricky and RL did what it does and held me up a little once again as well, and it's no surprise this patch was a tad late.
I've said this many times before, but I'm not entirely happy with the current patch. The many lakes and lagoons of the Amazon river are fiddly and annoying, however as usual I'll just have to either settle with what I have or tweak it slightly when I next get the chance. As I mentioned last time, next up on the schedule is Saskatchewan, then Alberta, before jumping back to South America to add the Brazilian states of Para and Amapa.
I really need to write up a dedicated post answering some replies at some point soon, but it's getting pretty late now, so I'll leave it for tomorrow. Even though I'm not the best at replying to things, it's nice to see active discussion in the thread.
Patch 97 - Guyana's & Brazil 1;
- Added Guyana
- Added Suriname
- Added French Guiana
- Added Roraima
- Added Amazonas
- Added a chunk of northern Para because why not?
I've said this many times before, but I'm not entirely happy with the current patch. The many lakes and lagoons of the Amazon river are fiddly and annoying, however as usual I'll just have to either settle with what I have or tweak it slightly when I next get the chance. As I mentioned last time, next up on the schedule is Saskatchewan, then Alberta, before jumping back to South America to add the Brazilian states of Para and Amapa.
I really need to write up a dedicated post answering some replies at some point soon, but it's getting pretty late now, so I'll leave it for tomorrow. Even though I'm not the best at replying to things, it's nice to see active discussion in the thread.
Patch 97 - Guyana's & Brazil 1;
- Added Guyana
- Added Suriname
- Added French Guiana
- Added Roraima
- Added Amazonas
- Added a chunk of northern Para because why not?
I'm sure you would've noticed this soon enough, but my OCD can't help but point it out. There appears to be an uncolored pixel in the southwestern corner of Roraima. Keep up the great work, though! o7
@Tanystropheus42 hey, I have a general question for you just out of curiosity
How much do you reference the original Q-BAM when drawing the coasts/borders? Especially in Europe it looks quite similar to the Q-BAM in the finer details (the large scale is adjusted to be in a perfect robinson though) in Denmark, France, Netherlands and Germany.
How much do you reference the original Q-BAM when drawing the coasts/borders? Especially in Europe it looks quite similar to the Q-BAM in the finer details (the large scale is adjusted to be in a perfect robinson though) in Denmark, France, Netherlands and Germany.