[WIP] A Slippy Map for ATS and ETS2

[truckermudgeon]

I'm trying to build a mobile route advisor for my tablet that supports routing with lane guidance.

It's a lot of work, and it's going to be a long journey. But it's been a fun and interesting one, so far.

As the first step of that journey, I've had to build a slippy map. I figured it might be of interest to the community, just as the ATS IRL Map, Printable Road Atlas of ATS, and ATS Company/Facility Directory projects have been of interest to me.

• ATS Slippy Map

The Map is definitely far from polished. All the roads have the same width (be it a 6-lane freeway or a 1-way dirt road), which is unfortunate. Road colors can also look a bit off. And icons/labels are finnicky in how they pop in/out while you zoom. But I think it's pretty cool to use / browse, especially when playing with rotation/pitch (try dragging left/right/up/down with the right mouse button).

There's still much to do, but in terms of next steps: I'll take a break from looks/cosmetics, and will leave the styling as-is for now (cartography and information design is hard!). The next thing I want to get into is routing / path finding. And then lane guidance (as long as the work to detect lanes isn't too difficult ).

[Optional Features]

So glad to see people working to make old school navigation possible in game!

[nautofon]

Wow, there it is. Very impressive!

[explosion65]

This is so cool! Great work!

[Bedavd]

Really really really cool work, truckermudgeon!

[nautofon]

In a recent conversation, you mentioned the notion of adding some sort of layer selection panel, allowing users to choose to show only services, or only companies etc. I think that'd be pretty useful!

Thinking further about layers: One difference between your map and e.g. Google Maps obviously is that your map only shows spatial data that exists in the ATS map dataset. This means that things like street names or the names of small scenery towns aren't visible. Adding street names here might be difficult for a variety of reasons, but I think that adding the names of scenery towns as a separate layer would be both possible and useful. What do you think?

If you're interested, I might be able to help by gathering and providing town names in a geospatial data format.

Here's how the result might look:

[ external image ]

[truckermudgeon]

Thanks, all!

I think that adding the names of scenery towns as a separate layer would be both possible and useful. What do you think?

If you're interested, I might be able to help by gathering and providing town names in a geospatial data format.

I think that's a great idea. I'd love for the data shown in the map to be as rich as possible, so I'm very interested in adding scenery towns to the map. Any help with gathering the data would be very appreciated!

[nautofon]

Cool. So the easiest way to gather the data seems to be flying around with the dev cam and using F11 to record place names. That would essentially yield an XYZ file with game coordinates looking like this:

Code: Select all

Shoshoni ;[26/03/2023 09:20:27] (sec-0013-0008);-49039.2;130.625;-28862.8;2.62012;-0.545163
Hiland ;[26/03/2023 09:21:33] (sec-0012-0007);-47415.2;167.875;-27015.6;2.50494;-1.52429
Powder River ;[26/03/2023 09:22:25] (sec-0012-0007);-44652.5;125.205;-25968;1.79075;-0.706406
Kaycee ;[26/03/2023 09:23:33] (sec-0011-0008);-42104.4;116.817;-29011.4;0.898502;-0.314748

For example: Kaycee is at easting = -42104.4 / southing = -29011.4

I could also convert this into a geospatial format for you if you prefer (GeoJSON/Shapefile/...), but I realize now that we would have to discuss SCS's map projection then. We would need to use the same CRS conversion from ATS coords to Web Mercator for things to match up properly. And I suspect the conversion I usually use is not the same as the one you've been using here.

One effect of using F11 in the way described above would be that I can only efficiently record names that I actually see in ATS. So for example, Sweetwater Station (between Lander and Muddy Gap), which exists in the game but is actually unnamed, would not end up in this dataset (which is perhaps even a good thing?). I also won't go to places that would be spoilers for me, so either way, the dataset is going to be incomplete. Still, it's a good start I suppose.

[truckermudgeon]

A semicolon-delimited file with game coordinates like in your code snippet SGTM.

...I can only efficiently record names that I actually see in ATS. So for example, Sweetwater Station (between Lander and Muddy Gap), which exists in the game but is actually unnamed, would not end up in this dataset (which is perhaps even a good thing?). I also won't go to places that would be spoilers for me, so either way, the dataset is going to be incomplete. Still, it's a good start I suppose.

Yep, I think that's fine. This project is a (perpetual) WIP, after all

[nautofon]

Started out with Wyoming, will get onto Colorado next. Will you subscribe to activity notifications there, or would you prefer I announce future updates here in this thread?