After a moderately longer time than I thought it would take, British Columbia is finally done. The patch proved nastier to finish than expected, which coupled with RL getting in the way caused the schedule to slip by a week longer than I thought it should take. Nevertheless, it's now
finally done.
To be blunt, it was horrible, as not only is the coast an intensely fractal one (damn glaciers), projection distortion this close to the edge of the map really throws things off, and makes it rather difficult to translate maps from, say, equirectangular to distorted Robinson. After a week banging my head against a wall trying to continue using sources
such as NASA's Earth viewer, I finally accepted the inevitable and spent a couple of days last week trying to get my head around the basics of GIS, hoping to use that to transform some of my datasets into something more useable. While those efforts were useful, it was the discovery last week of
a high-def zoomable Robinson webmap buried fairly deep in the basemap options of ARCGIS' free online version that really got progress going again. After a lot of finagling and fiddling, I was also able to overlay a dataset showing permanent ice cover on top of that map, which helped immensely.
After the ordeal that was British Columbia, I'm quite looking forward to the next patch, which should be considerably easier, and hopefully not take as long. Next up we return to South America, adding about a dozen states in North-East Brazil, however after that its back to another tricky job, a patch I'm calling Greenland 1. That will be followed by Central Brazil, then I'll belatedly make a start on Nunavut.
A few rather pointless quick observations. Firstly, this patch marks the first new addition of territory to the USA
since December 2021, nearly two years ago. Second, I've now finished all the Canadian provinces, as it's just the three territories left to go. More to the point, by my back-of-the-envelope maths, I'm a little under two thirds of the way through Canada, which feels like a notable milestone.
Just a couple of quick replies, then I'll get to the patch.
Were these left from something like an overlay or?
Those pixels are, as
@SupBros correctly surmised, Fernando de Noronha and Rocas Atoll. I added them ages ago, but forgot to pull them from the main layer to the WIP layer (the contents of which remain unpublished while I work on them) until I got to North-East Brazil. A combination of laziness and forgetfulness kept that going, and while I removed it from some of the patches I've since put out, the Islands kept creeping back in and I kept on forgetting to remove them. They'll be added officially with the next patch.
I wonder which coastline will be harder to do. British Columbia/Alaska or Chile
I would be willing to bet good money that southern Chile ends up being easier than British Columbia, for the simple reason that map distortion, while still a problem for Patagonia, isn't as severe as with British Columbia. That was the main reason this patch took a week longer than my initial estimations, so should it skew the difficulty where base geography is about as bad between the two.
Patch 101 - Oh, Canada 7 (British Columbia);
- Added British Columbia
- Added the Alaska Panhandle
- Mild tweaks to Alberta and Washington State
