NES World/Regional Maps Requests Thread

[Symphony D.]

Interesting question: on a NESing map of the modern world, what should be the cutoff limit for a city to be displayed, based on population? Eg: Everything above X should be displayed."

What is X? 50,000 100,000 people? More? Less? I'm leaning toward 50,000, personally.

 

[Luckymoose]

50,000/ Thus my home town might be shown. I don't know quite how large a population it has. But its close to 50,000.

 

[North King]

Relative importance to the area. Thus in a low density population zone, small cities can be displayed, but in the area of, say, Bowash, having cities that are 50,000 in size doesn't really mean much.

 

[Symphony D.]

That's a rather difficult measure by which to gauge when composing a list for the entire world, you know.

 

[North King]

Well, yes. But I tend to leave things up to the mapmaker's judgement as much as possible.

 

[jeps]

50 000 is too small. my suburb (quite far from the actual city) has over 150k.

In the USA, 601 cities/towns are over 50k Cities over 50k in 2000

 

[Swissempire]

100,000 definatley

 

[Symphony D.]

50,000 is quite large in most other countries, however. For example, Australia only has 18 cities above 100,000 people, and Canada only has 41. The United States, having the world's 3rd largest population, is not exactly the best benchmark for city size on a global scale.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

I think it should vary. For example Mississauga, Ontario is a very large city, but would be represented by the city that was Greater Toronto. However, a city such as Whitehorse is the only city of its size for roughly 1000 km, so it is relatively justified in being in a map (depending on your standards for what should be the smallest cities).

 

[Symphony D.]

Again though, that's exceedingly arbitrary, especially if all cities are designated by a single indicator. Why should Tokyo, Japan get the same marker as Parral, Mexico, when one is vastly more important than the other, ignoring special city designations entirely?

I'm not a fan of random creator arbitration unless there's just no other alternative. I think if there's going to be a universal city marker, it should be everything of a certain size and up. If you're going to make it vary from place to place, then I think you need different sized markers, which gets into the problem of population change over time...

Maybe you could have a listing in stats or something ("City Display: > 100,000") but that sounds exceedingly messy.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

Fair point. But I think it's a fine system. It's just a matter of opinion then.

 

[Symphony D.]

Maybe, but agreeing to disagree doesn't result in productive solutions.

I require a solution because if I'm going to spend the time to get GPS coordinates for every major city on the planet and put them in an Excel spreadsheet, I want something that works and has at least some explainable motive other than whim.

So plebians, ideas! Here's the discussed options (that I would agree to):

1.) Everything above a certain size, globally (fold in multiple neighboring large cities into Greater Metropolitan Areas; eg: New York, Tokyo); one marker.
2.) Cities by importance regionally, many markers.
3.) Everything above a certain size, nationally (stats listed); one marker.

Or you can suggest something.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

How many cities do you want on the map?

 

[Symphony D.]

Tough question. By eyeballing it I'd say NES2 VI had around 300 - 600 and was decently populated (except in Asia, which was way under-represented compared to say, France). This map is both somewhat larger (3072x1564 vs. 2675x1362) and going to be modern (2000 - 2006) so preferably somewhere between 1,000 on the lower end and maybe 2,500 to 3,000 on the upper. It's difficult to estimate well.

 

[Swissempire]

#2 is the way to go.

Importance, both on a regional and international scale, is a great measure to use. Especially if you want around 2K cities. You don't want America to have like 600 Cities, half of which know one has heard of. You should choose instead things such as Population Centers, Culture Centers(tourists, international stuff), Capitals, Major Economic Centers, and Centers of Regional importance, etc etc. A city that we as Americans might find not worthy of the map REGIONALLY could be very important, such as cities in Central Asia or Africa, or that city in Canadialandistan that Iggy keeps whining about(Graycow....Blacksheep...Rainbowpig....something like that)

 

[Symphony D.]

The vast bulk of cities are only important as population centers. In which case, using population as the basic reason for placing cities is the most obvious solution. Your arguments are only really good in the sense of not having cities nobody's ever heard of.

Having had a whole day to think about it after having my brain frazzled by a Latin final, I'm favoring Option 3. Since Population will be a vaguely number driven stat, each level can just have an indicator for city size displayed for that size. It's flexible and relative without being arbitrary and it doesn't involve multiple markers. Occam's razor.

 

[Symphony D.]

Moving on to a completely different subject, how do people feel about the display range of this? Mostly designed to display the larger population centers of North America (ignoring Mexico). As it stands it's somewhat large but I think once I mess around with it some it should have a smaller file size. I could also probably chop off more of Nova Scotia and the Atlantic since they aren't really doing much.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

It ignores Edmonton and the fairly large cities in Alaska, but other than that it seems good.

 

[Symphony D.]

I elected to chop off Northern Canada and Alaska because their populations are miniscule compared to the main body of the continent, and getting them involves adding huge quantities of empty space. Diminishing returns, basically (both on file size and work involved). I sort of feel like slicing off Nova Scotia, Maine, and the Florida Keys for similar reasons.

Started working on the costal layer. That'll be the main hard part... once that's done it'll probably go fairly quickly. Annoyingly, the cities are calibrated in the traditional NES 4x4 fat cross. Grr.

 

[jalapeno_dude]

I have problems with some of the city selections, though I'm not sure if that's your fault.

Let's take the Northeast as an example. Why are Brookhaven and Islip shown, but not Hartford or Worcester?