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Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 2 2013, 08:47 PM

DATA SITE: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8m3vhgcrk9rmebs/q5RxqpYtFC

NORTH AMERICA MAP AS OF 2075 (includes Storm Front Events)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4g5p89xr5uyixfr/NorthAmerica.pdf

CURRENT ISSUES

South Florida Borders
-- These are not consistent between written description and maps (which just show a line across the state).
See http://www.michael.burrage.net/pages/games/shadowrun/SR-maps/sr-maps.html and the SWA/SONA derived borders at https://www.dropbox.com/s/32384i3uj6see1p/FloridaBorders.pdf

Boise
-- Boise is in the wrong location on the SONA map, as shown here https://www.dropbox.com/s/4bj5amiv6lu9nu4/Boise_Wrong.PNG
-- Boise is in roughly the right spot on the Tir Tairngire map, but the other parts of the eastern border with the Ute (now PCC), SSC, and TT are not consistent with other published maps.

Bogota
-- There are borders changes described, but not shown in Storm Front. The Pre-Storm Front borders based on SWA are shown here https://www.dropbox.com/s/reeor266e6x499b/Bogota_Area_AllAdminAreas.pdf


PCC Land Purchase
-- Based on information provided by Wak Shaani you can see the border changes and land swap details at https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kr36a0211g4szzo/Zef2p4w1fB

San Diego
-- Based on the Corporate Enclaves map, San Diego is now a series of islands. See https://www.dropbox.com/s/gjukvh7dwwv3dc3/sandiego_flooded.pdf

California
-- The regional CFS map and the Los Angeles map do match match up. You can see what got sunk in LA here https://www.dropbox.com/s/z4k2c6et60ut6zo/LA_Flooded.pdf
-- For what happened to Camp Pendleton and Oceanslime see https://www.dropbox.com/s/nsf1wqf0qzwjh1n/pendleton_flooded.pdf
-- Note that flooded areas shown in the Corporate Enclave map cross mountain ranges and even have shoreline where there isn't any.

Europe
-- You can see the georectified German Anniversary edition map here https://www.dropbox.com/s/gp9vlrr4ka06u00/EuropeMap.pdf
-- Note that the Denmark shore does not match what is shown in other sources (including other German books).
-- The Westphalia area has been updated to match the Reiseführer (Travel Guide) sourcebook and you can see that here https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4tp5xmt5odabdsi/K6nynvBMWl

Gold and Ivory Coast
-- Uploaded my attempted fixes to https://www.dropbox.com/sh/5lwgnx0leohn71j/q4W8E4R7uN
-- The maps should be consistent with Feral Cities, p. 69 with a few fixes ("Asante" and not "Assante," for example).
-- I don't think I can georectify the Lagos map (Feral Cities, p. 93). It's too divergent from the current area to find tie points. I've attached a map showing one of my attempts as LagosNowWhat

Posted by: lokii Jul 2 2013, 10:58 PM

Maybe, you can use this world map. I already did the registration of the Sixth World Almanac map two years back or so.

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/images/6/6d/Kartendokumentation_World_Map_Differences.png

You want brown lines plus red lines for the Almanac borders.

Posted by: tete Jul 3 2013, 12:23 AM

As much as I hate to say it... I hear the Bing API for maps is pretty fair to good and they are way better on the traffic maps for Seattle than Google... I guess it helps when its your backyard.

[edit] linkage
http://www.microsoft.com/maps/developers/web.aspx

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 3 2013, 12:25 AM

Who controls St. Louis? It looks like the border goes right into the center of the city.

The CAS/UCAS border looks like it follows the Missouri River in the East, and the west side follows I-44 down to St. James. It looks like it should split south of Rolla and across Mark Twain National Forest following no real features, and then roughly following I-44 again north of Fort Leonard Wood. Springfield appears to be on the CAS side of the I-44 border and then the border just sort of shoots out without following anything.

Posted by: Sendaz Jul 3 2013, 12:38 AM

It does, its split between the UCAS and CAS, which leads to all sorts of interesting infighting among the groups wanting to reunite the town and is still a major stop point for smugglers going to and from New Orleans.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 3 2013, 03:02 AM

The North American countries have been created, including Aztlan and the Yucatan. Bare bones right now, but let me know what you think. I cleaned up the CAS/UCAS borders and think I cleared up some issues on the Sioux/UCAS borders where it was obvious the map was following a river or road.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8m3vhgcrk9rmebs/q5RxqpYtFC

Posted by: lokii Jul 3 2013, 06:58 AM

The actual shapefile (extension .shp) is missing?

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 3 2013, 07:17 AM

huh. I dropped the entire folder in there. Will fix it tomorrow. Really happy with how it came out and how easy it was to create. The borders should be topologically correct, but it's not in a geodatabase so I can't actually enforce that. Even I'm not that interested in doing any serious spatial analysis of the Shadowrun numbers pulled out of a hat

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 3 2013, 07:07 PM

Shapefile fixed. Will work on the South American countries today.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 3 2013, 09:04 PM

I've updated the shapefile to contain all the nations of the Americas, including the Caribbean League and all South American countries.

As I thought it might be useful, I created a quick map of the Bogota area that shows the nearby inhabited areas (including their urban sprawl and current estimated 2050 populations) and the current administrative sub-units (provinces, counties, etc.). You can find the map as a PDF in the same dropbox folder.

I need to clean up some islands ownership and then I'll start on Africa.

If anyone wants a map of anything for areas already finished let me know exactly what you want. I'm not a cartographer per se and don't have limitless free time to create custom maps, but I know my way around ArcGIS pretty damn well

If you want a map created and need the MXD let me know, I don't mind sharing.

When I get some time I'll also start adding data from the 6WA and previous books for things like languages, pop figures, and so on. Might be interesting to help visualize this stuff.

Update: Fixed some topology errors of uncertain origin with the borders of the Sioux and the CAS/Aztlan (you had to zoom in really far to see them, generally). I also uploaded a PDF map of the Denver region.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 4 2013, 03:26 AM

Finished digitizing all of Africa, Israel, Syria, Palestine, and the Arabian Caliphate.

I did a bit of surgery around Asamado because it was a bit of a cluster in that area and the borders cut up major cities and stuff (which I doubt was the intent). On the AfricaChanges map you can see that Asamando expanded a bit, as did Sekondi, at the expense of the Gold and Ivory Coast Tribal Lands. The orange areas are existing major urban areas.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 5 2013, 09:21 PM

All of Europe has been digitized and files updated. I'll be uploading a few maps soon. Note that there are some border issues around Luxembourgh because the SOE and SWA maps are really hard to square with existing borders and city locations (and with each other). Will work on fixing that later.

Posted by: lokii Jul 5 2013, 11:35 PM

I will have a look at the shapefile at some point. For now maybe a few comments.

Don't know what you mean but I noticed that the Sioux/UCAS border seems to be almost identical with the border between time zones -6 and -7. I didn't end up using that information though, as I didn't have coordinates for the time zones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3a%53tandard_time_zones_of_the_world.png

This is a rough suggestion for a correction of the old (pre-2074) border between Aztlan and Amazonia. It's based on the verbal description of the border from the Aztlan sourcebook. Following it the Anniversary edition map (and thus the Almanac map) is incorrect. Specifically Santiago de Cali should be on Aztlaner territory. I still haven't corrected that issue on my maps. Of course now after the end of the war the border has moved a bit to the south.

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Aztlan-Amazonien-Grenzverlauf-Korrektur.png

Just as a general comment before I continue, the Almanac world map has a lot of issues. Especially Asia has changed quite a lot from the geography laid out in Shadows of Asia. The first map I linked to, shows were territories have been readjusted. This was done without any explanation in the canon and in an unlikely way. For example the Chinese states now conform more to the old PRC administrative borders. More on the specifics for Africa and Europe below.

I don't know what problems you had, but the African borders are badly aligned with the satellite image underneath. Your solution changes the map quite a bit. Don't know, I eventually got pretty close in marrying the intention of the Sixth World Almanac with Cyberpirates! using additional geographic features:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Anpassung_Kernbereich_Gold-_und_Elfenbeinküste.png

Yeah, forget the Almanac on Germany. The German translation had this corrected map:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Adl_almanach_de.jpg

But perhaps even more helpful is the Germany map from the German translation of the Anniversary edition and a map based on the SOX map in the German and French SOX sourcebook (the map from the book is unfortunately no longer available from the Pegasus homepage):

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:ADL_2072.jpg
http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Karte_Sox.png

Once again, the map I first linked to shows other problems with Europe, such as Greece, which misses the lower half of Albania and the Swiss Canton Ticino which actually went to Italy.

I have to see, maybe I can convert some of my coordinate sets into a shapefile.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 6 2013, 01:00 AM

-- I ended up using rivers and roads for the border. It seems to match the original artistic intent and the current administrative boundaries.

-- That's almost 100 km south of the Almanac border. In my mind I imagine the new Aztlan border follows the mountain range down to Ipiales but I since War! had no maps I don't know
-- I'll keep the borders as close to what was in the Almanac as possible for right now. But yeah, I would file that entire border area as being in an area of canonical doubt.

-- I finished Asia so you can see that they exactly match provincial boundaries in most cases. I don't have a big problem with that. Certainly simplified map creation that's for sure.

-- The biggest problem was Asamando which didn't correspond to any natural features on the ground, barely corresponded at all to any existing units in Ghana, and just didn't look like it made much sense. Your version looks good, I've had some trouble rectifying your maps though. What basemaps were you using?

-- That Anniversary map looks really nice but I'm having a hell of a problem trying to rubbersheet it.

So the SAR borders follows no natural or manmade barriers and just sort of wanders around the countryside? Hmm. I'll have to consider how to handle this one.

-- I suppose in this case it's also a question of what was an art mistake and what was actually intended.

Posted by: lokii Jul 6 2013, 07:49 AM

Well, I understand the sentiment, but even if they had the intention to simplify future map making, they could have gone one administrative level lower for most countries to get a closer match and still use current borders. In some cases the differences are really glaring, Henan has lost a third of its territory...

The map is a Mercator projection, only cut off in the south and maybe north I think. Maybe this helps?

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/images/a/a7/Kartendokumentation_World_Map_Differences_2000_and_2072.png

You are right Asamando basically is free hand drawn on the map. I have the coordinates (long/lat) right here in the commentary below the image. Can you import something like that?

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Fl%C3%A4che_asamando_1_merc_n150.svg

Same for Baulé:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Fl%C3%A4che_baule_1_merc_n168.svg

If, you can import Asamando, I should be able to give you the SOX in the same format.

By the way, as you mentioned adding statistics, here is an overview of the world population:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Weltbev%C3%B6lkerung

There is also CSV file with the data at the bottom under "Datensatz" (data set).

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 6 2013, 07:11 PM

-- I went down to administrative subunit level if that helps. I checked the Shadows of Asia map and it looks pretty close to the SWA version.

-- Yeah I can use the coordinates directly. Note that the Cyberpirates and your map don't quite match the SWA map which has the Tribal Lands surrounding Asamando on all sides. Probably a bit of artistic lazyness there.

-- Sounds good. I think those borders need a closer look in the future, though.

-- I'll join that to the dataset (well, after I check to make sure we were using the same names and such).

-- If you want this info in another data format that Arc supports, let me know. I can also check with Catalyst to see if they mind me releasing GeoTIFF versions of the Sixth World Atlas map.

EDIT: Once the major borders are all fixed I'm going to start adding the Shadowrun administrative units, when available.

Posted by: lokii Jul 6 2013, 10:12 PM

I look at my map and it doesn't. But I guess it depends on your definition of "pretty close". I don't think they went deeper than level 1, you can get better results if you do. That's how I constructed the borders, adding or subtracting the administrative areas to get as close as possible and than use correction lines that I traced from rubber-sheeted Shadowrun maps. Never finished the documentation of all constructions, but here would be one example of the process:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Konstruktionsserie_Amzonien_1.png

No, if you look at the differences 2000/2072 map or the Almanac comparison map I incorporated that. The corrective coordinates should be "Korrekturlinie 6: Grenze Mali-Faso--Gold- und Elfenbeinküste Stammesländer" here:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Fl%C3%A4che_gold-_und_elfenbeink%C3%BCste_1_merc_n6951.svg

You are right about the Cyberpirates! map. But if you remove the portion of Burkina Faso with the above line Asamando remains at the same position I think.

Here you go:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei%3a%53OX_coordinates.txt

Also, I remembered that the French wiki has a copy of the map. If you look at the level of detail, I would say the SOX border is well-described.

http://shadowrun.fr/wiki/Image%3a%53OX.jpg

It's in German of course, but I think most of the names should be recognizable. Just ask if anything remains unclear.

There I have some stuff too.

I already gave you the link to the Germany map which has the new Alliance states.

Pegasus added administrative borders to Azania for the German translation of the Almanac. That should have the seal of approval of Catalyst:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:GeoPositionskarte_Azania.svg

That's how France should look with the known changes: Expanded Bretagne (04), Auvergne Zone (23), added Wallonie (24),
SOX portion of Lorraine as Nord Lorraine (22):

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:%C3%9Cbersicht_Regionen_Frankreich.png

Inofficial Kenia, assuming current administrative units plus the new Mount Kilimanjaro district:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:%C3%9Cbersicht_Provinzen_Kenia.png

UCAS states map (finally with all Canadian additions):

http://shadowrun.wikia.com/wiki/File:Overview_UCAS_states.png

Also are you aware of the missing alterations to the coastline in Sixth World Almanac map? There is mainly California and the European coast. For the latter one, the UNL map: (the German altered coast line is on the Pegasus map I linked to above and I don't have a close up map of Denmark)

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:GeoPositionskarte_VNL.svg

Posted by: lokii Jul 6 2013, 10:23 PM

Oh, yeah. Fun German fact: Ivory is called "Elfenbein" in German which if you know nothing about the etymology would translate to "leg of an elf" unfortunately in reality it just means "bones of an elefant". Anyway you can imagine the pun potential.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 6 2013, 10:50 PM

-- The SWA map is drawn on what appears to be the NASA Blue Marble graphic. The coastal maps from the CFS sourcebook are too abstract to really get much from. In general I'm just assuming the coasts are basically the same unless it's clearly not.

Posted by: lokii Jul 7 2013, 06:07 AM

At the time of CFS the coast line has not yet changed. I'm referring to the 2069 earthquake, its results can be seen on a map in Corporate Enclaves. Once again I don't have a close up map of the broken coast as it is split between these to countries:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:GeoPositionskarte Kalifornien.svg
http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:GeoPositionskarte_Pueblo.svg

EDIT: By the way, the southern border of Trans-Polar Aleut Nation follows the arctic circle on the North American continent, the same on northeast Asia but there the "base line" is altered.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 7 2013, 07:30 AM

<chuckle> Wow, well . . . this whole exercise has really reinforced the idea that the Shadowrun canon has become an unmanageable clusterfuck. I looked at the map of LA in Enclaves and just set it down and laughed. It doesn't make any sense with what is said in other sourcebooks. Were the authors even familiar with the LA region? Did later authors realize LA was flooded? So many questions .... ugh.

Yeah, will update the coastline stuff tomorrow I think. Looks like some decent registration locations I can use.

TPA I'm saving for last mainly because it's the least problematic to change later I read through the Bogota stuff in Storm Front but it's not clear where the new border is really supposed to be. No maps at all, again.

Edit: BTW what are you using to generate your maps? Is it a format I can read in Arc or that you can export as a GeoTIFF or something?

Posted by: hermit Jul 7 2013, 10:12 AM

Magic. In this case, a huge astral ... something called Deep Lacuna which just manifested because it felt like that. And no, I doubt they had.

One issues I didn't find mentioned: there's the issue of the huge swath of land Aztlan feigned to give to the Confeds and gave to Pueblo instead. Nobody really knows what this looks like (since no maps), but I made a http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v284/hermitesf/Rio_Gambit_Map_1_cut.jpgonce the author (Wakshaani) said is "pretty accurate".

Posted by: lokii Jul 7 2013, 12:54 PM

Though I would argue, it's exactly this kind of infrastructure work you are doing that makes it manageable again.

I sure hope so. Somebody want to depress me with counter examples?

You would think that, but I remember it was one of the maps that gave me trouble. Once again profit from my pains: Any of the coordinate sets found in the description of the following three country areas that have the word "Küstenlinie" (coast line) in the title corresponds to a trace of the new Californian coast:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Fl%C3%A4che_california_free_state_1_merc_n3614.svg
http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Fl%C3%A4che_pueblo_corporate_council_1_merc_n1233.svg
http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Fl%C3%A4che_aztlan_1_merc_n5664.svg

They are not completely accurate but I think a good approximation. Back then my registration was somewhat okay, but despite the city markers I couldn't get Middle to Southern California and Baja California to match all at the same time and ended up doing local matching instead. Maybe you will fair better.

My maps are based on the Global Administrative Areas (GADM) dataset (that's why most of my maps have a particular Creative Commons license):

http://gadm.org/country

Using that data I compiled them along with Sixth World coordinates using a Perl library called Proj4. Handwritten code... Somehow I didn't want to use the available GIS software.

http://search.cpan.org/~sderle/Geo-Proj4-0.11/Proj4.pm

My own coordinate sets of geographical structures of the Sixth world are in exactly the format you saw. I might be able to create a shapefile, with say all my traces. But I would have to look into how to do that first.

Now, if you draw a map of the new Atzlan-Amazonian border that is said to be "pretty accurate", I could do some timeline map keeping.


Something I did not think of back when I did all the map registration stuff, is that at least some of the map makers hang around Dumpshock or similar places. If they could be made to confess the exact projection parameters of their maps, much more accurate traces should be possible. I have a list of maps in sourcebooks here with a lonely second column that begs to be filled:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Shadowhelix:Karten/Quellen

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 7 2013, 06:18 PM

Well, I can hope. At the very least I want to build something so that maps can be easily generated, so we don't have a War! and Storm Front situation again.


SWA doesn't mention anything about a good chunk of the city being underwater. It just says "The city is still recovering from its most recent disaster, the double earthquakes and subsequent formation of the astral construct known as the Deep Lacuna."

Combine that with the current coastline, and one would be excused not to know about it, and does any of the recent sourcebooks that mention the Lacuna also mention the city being sunk?

Well. Let's put it this way. For Salish-Shidhe, Tir Tairngire, and the Trans-Polar Aleut maps in SR3 products I wasn't asked about maps and didn't need to do anything about it. Your best bet is actually to contact Adam Jury and see if he has some insight into how the maps were created.

Posted by: lokii Jul 7 2013, 06:57 PM

I believe the Horizon Adventures and one of the Dawn of the Artifacts books had maps that indicated awareness of the changed coast line. But very true the Sixth World Almanac is a loose canon could lead to accidental retcon on casual handling, I hope people don't trust that book too much.

Okay, thanks for the tip. Maybe I do that.

Posted by: hermit Jul 7 2013, 07:10 PM

Here's the new http://oi40.tinypic.com/jv51fr.jpg. And here's a http://tinypic.com/r/2pq5gzc/5. Not my work, but probably the best guess we have. All we know is that Aztlan "advanced 50 kilometers".

Posted by: lokii Jul 7 2013, 07:28 PM

Thanks.

Well, that is my map. Part of my War! relief package.

By the way, any news on the map front from Shadowrun Fifth Edition? I would be very astonished if they didn't have a North America map and by all means it should have the new Aztlan border on it.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 7 2013, 07:28 PM

Ok got the Corporate Enclave LA map georectified. Why do they call the I-15 the I-5? Anyways, I've uploaded the georectified image to the Dropbox as a GeoTIFF. It looks like over half of the LA basin is flooded. Several HUNDRED square kilometers of ground. This should have caused a massive tsunami. I suppose all that mass just got swapped with the Lacuna though (not going to worry about that stuff, the other understated ramifications are harder to explain).

Looks like parts of Pendleton got flooded. Call in the FMC!

Update: I rectified your coastlines and we had quite a bit different borders for CFS/Tir and a tiny difference for the CFS/Aztlan border:) I'll be tracing your coastline though, I think it looks pretty swank.

Update: Also, I fixed the remaining topology errors. So there shouldn't be any more underlaps/overlaps of country borders anywhere now. Also fixed some of the islands off the amazonian coast but at some point who owns those (and some of the Greek/Turkish islands) should be squared away :/

Update: Uploaded your CFS sunken coastline map as a GeoTIFF (Coastline_Sunken1) for reference.

Update: The overview Cali map is extraordinarily distorted in the Enclaves book. Rectifying it is difficult.

Update: Hm. Ok something is actually wrong with the Corporate Enclave map on p. 12. It appears to be based on a local projection centered on LA. As you move away from there the map projection is distorting angles. I am not sure that I can exactly match the SoCal sinking profile.

Posted by: hermit Jul 7 2013, 08:48 PM

Well, the disaster that caused the flooded LA situation was caused by enchanted nuclear weapons (yes, really) and followed by two massive earthquakes (the "Twins"). To CGL's credit, in every LA supplement I can think of, this IS taken as a given.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 7 2013, 08:49 PM

OK I figured it out. The roads on the Corporate Enclave map are wrong. WAY wrong. And since I was using road intersections as tie points it was messing everything up.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 8 2013, 12:25 AM

OK my project for the day, fixing the coast of the CFS, PCC, and Aztlan as much as possible based on the Corporate Enclave book, is done. I don't have a lot of faith in the San Diego area but the LA rectified map was a perfect match so that should be good. Note that the southern part of the LA map does NOT match the coastline shown in the overview map.

I also updated the CFS/PCC/Aztlan borders based on the maps.

Also uploaded some simple maps showing the areas of LA and San Diego that got flooded. For the Marines I have a zoomed-in area showing Oceaside and Pendleton

Edit: No, the flooded areas do not seem to match existing mountain ranges or even coastlines

Posted by: lokii Jul 8 2013, 06:42 AM

So, I wasn't imagining problems with that map.

Posted by: lokii Jul 8 2013, 06:51 AM

I don't remember enchanted nuclear weapons involved in this (Winternight leftovers?), but the Twins caused the flooding of LA. Elevation shifts are further explained with the Deep Lacuna (see "The Fall").

Posted by: hermit Jul 8 2013, 07:21 AM

It was Winternight's strike at the San Andreas Fault that caused the Twins, if I am not mistaken.

Posted by: lokii Jul 8 2013, 07:49 AM

The earthquakes were 2069 though.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 8 2013, 07:54 AM

Is that in a novel? Systems Failure doesn't mention it, but half the stuff from that plot book was conveniently ignored ever since ~

Posted by: hermit Jul 8 2013, 08:45 AM

Corporate Enclaves, I think? There were no English novels set in LA since White Noise.

Posted by: lokii Jul 8 2013, 02:24 PM

Okay, White Noise? Never heard of it.

Posted by: bannockburn Jul 8 2013, 02:45 PM

Probably Dead Air, by Jak Koke

Posted by: hermit Jul 8 2013, 03:40 PM

Dead Air. Sorry.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 8 2013, 09:28 PM

On the German map of Europe the SOX is a zone, with only Luxembourgh being a country. The Saarland doesn't have a German administrative unit (the borders are Westrhein-Luxemburg to the north and Badisch-Pfalz to the east. I'm not clear about how this works. Is it a zone or a country? Is Luxembourgh part of it?

Oh, and the coastline on the German map to the north is really screwy. I think that part must have been rushed at the end or something because I have the borders matching really well but those islands are all distorted. I had to use a spline fit to get it to match, I've uploaded the georectified TIFF as Europe_Rectified to the dropbox so you can see it. Fairly happy with how it matched up. Will be fixing the borders and such today.

Posted by: lokii Jul 8 2013, 10:10 PM

Ah, I kinda see the connection with white noise. Anyway you might be right about the nuclear devices.

The SOX is a not country, but there is a conflict over its status. The corporations basically believe it to be their possession after they got some special rights of usage. Germany and France still regard their portion of the zone as belonging to their territory. Luxembourg theoretically still belongs to the people of Westrhein-Luxemburg were they settled after fleeing their country. There was some plotline with France trying to assert its rights a while back. So I would say your representation of the SOX is down to personal taste. I chose to go with the old country borders, so German/French/Luxembourgish border and put a special marker on the map for the zone. Like this:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:GeoPositionskarte_ADL.svg

Not sure, what you mean. There are a lot of new islands. Or do you mean the Frisian Islands?

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 11 2013, 02:59 AM

-- Big updates to the Balkans regions to match Shadows of Europe.
-- Updated Netherlands to match Shadows of Europe as much as possible. Note that the European Anniversary coastline does not really match the SoE coast. Also used lokii's map. It may still be off a bit but I can adjust later.
-- Should be able to fix up the last parts of Africa that need to be updated and Version 1 will be complete (map consistent with the Shadowrun world up to 2072).

Posted by: Seriously Mike Jul 11 2013, 01:53 PM

Nope, Corporate Enclaves clearly states that the Winternight attack on LA failed for an unknown reason and whatever they planned to deploy didn't go off. There is speculation that Winternight's weapon cache is hidden somewhere in the heavily irradiated area near the former nuclear plant south of LA.

Posted by: lokii Jul 13 2013, 10:08 PM

This my first continent-wide construction documentation, starting with Africa.

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/images/7/75/Konstruktionsdokumentation_Afrika.png

It is meant to be viewed from close up. The different administrative areas used for construction (0 to 2 here) are marked with a green value of descending brightness. The black lines are normal borders. White dashed lines are the Shadowrun country borders, yellow lines are coordinates taken from Shadowrun maps, which with the exception of a few cases (like the Lake Volta for Asante) do not match other geographical features as far as I know. All these lines are designated a number (one line for the Ilemi Triangle in/above Kenya is still missing). White dashed plus yellow lines form the whole Sixth World border of a country.

I hadn't noticed before, but the western border of Asamando is probably supposed to be the border of Ghana. So at least this side could be based on an existing border.

I will see, whether I can get all the yellow lines into a shapefile.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 13 2013, 10:17 PM

Cool. I sent a few questions to the line developer about a few map issues that I hope will clear up some of the Africa issues. I've put the Ivory Coast border changes off until I get some official word on the intent with Asamando (honestly, I don't think any writers looked at a map of that area at all).

I also noticed I was using the wrong southern border for the SSC and fixed that (the Idaho Falls region is a bit hazy in how that's supposed to work, I don't think the city is supposed to be bisected). I need to fix the Denver area as I was using the SWA and those borders are ... not very reliable compared to the close-up maps. I also ran the entire shapefile through a topology check again after adding all those islands. I found a LOT of islands that are not clearly divvied up to anyone and made those separate entries.

I will probably also try and fix some of the Seattle problems but that's already a headache as the various Seattle sourcebooks all trace their map lineage to the SR1 Seattle sourcebook which had some seriously weird problems (especially with regard to the downtown arrangement). That might require some developer insight too.

Posted by: lokii Jul 13 2013, 11:16 PM

You are aware of Fex' map of the Seattle Metroplex?

http://www.fexes.de/downloads/SR2050_Seattle_Districts_(lowres).pdf

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 13 2013, 11:25 PM

Nope, never heard of it before . . . but it looks like it has the borders at the level of detail I was looking for

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 16 2013, 04:17 AM

OK I've used lokii's borders for the Baule Empire and Anyl for the most part (using the Konstruction map). However, I cannot actually reconcile SWA with Cyberpirates and the borders shown in Feral Cities. So I've used the Feral Cities borders, which shows Asamando as having the lands shown as contested in the SWA. Feral Cities also plays merry hell with the borders on the west of Nigeria so Benin and a few other borders got moved around a bit. I got pretty good tie points on the Feral Cities map so I'm pretty sure that matches.

So. Well. I don't think there is any possible way of getting all these Ivory Coast borders to match the books since the books are all over the place (the Cyberpirates map in particular seems to use geographic features more as suggestions). So I've applied some Ken's Personal Metaplot Magic to reconcile these borders to make some sort of sense and await further refinement and instruction from the lords on high. Basically that means that I've looked at all the maps (including lokii's heroic efforts to get this fixed) and have done what I can and called it good.

I expanded the Caribbean League a bit as it shows that ALL the islands off Amazonia are actually part of the League.

I feel a LOT better about the new borders for Denver. I used the KML made by Leigh to trace around.

I have no idea what the new PCC border is so haven't updated that. Awaiting word from on high.

Fixed more of the PCC/S-S border. The southern border isn't drawn very consistently so meh, it follows the river up to near Idaho Falls.

Note that Boise is NOT a split city. That's not consistent with the early novels that say Boise is SSC controlled nor SONA or NAN1. I don't care what some random short story says

Seattle has a TON of data available (http://www5.kingcounty.gov/gisdataportal/Default.aspx) and some of my fellow students do research for King County, so a future Seattle map might be pretty feature rich (Everett . . . not so much lol)! The current boundaries are just "good enough" and a rough trace. So don't be surprised if it looks weird close up - this isn't intended to be the detailed Seattle map that will be entirely separate (FYI I'll be splitting off LA as well).

Posted by: lokii Jul 16 2013, 02:06 PM

So, Europe next:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Konstruktionsdokumentation_Europa.png

I didn't mark the lines that create or modify islands of the coast of the Netherlands and Germany. I also didn't mark the interior borders of the Balkans region, as those are from around the early 2060s and supposedly very fluent. The European portion of West Turkey is missing. I put include that with Asia. But the free city of Istanbul/Constantinople is there.

EDIT: I added the rest of the new islands.

Well, I took the view that the Almanac map tries to go back to Cyberpirates so I pretty much ignored Feral Cities except for Nigeria.

By the way, it's Anyi after the Anyi people. The Almanac reliably mislabels the place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyi_people

Okay, the map from the Tir Tairngire sourcebook is actually the best source in this regard. I didn't end up using it, as I didn't have a good data source for road coordinates that was compatible with the license for the rest of my geo data. Anyway the map shows that the border between SSC/TT and then SSC/PCC is actually supposed to follow Interstate 84 then Interstate 86. The map of North America in NAN2 shows the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_84_(Oregon–Utah)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_86_(west)

Actually, I reproduced that in one of the first maps I made. That was before I started using GADM:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Karte_Tir_Tairngire.png

The Tír Tairngire map also shows that Boise is split between SSC and the Tír (just not the three country border city of later maps, though actually this can also be found on the NAN2 map) and I would argue there is some information from SoNA to back this up:

p.123 "Today the southwest corner of the city is technically still in Tir hands--but this is more a polite fiction used to justify a large tax and duty free merchant zone." (technically reads border to me)

p.152 "The east is wide open except around Boise, where there are some large military stations. The Boise checkpoint guards on both sides are happy to take bribes though. Just don't expect to escape to safety in the SSC if you're being chased by Tir cops--the two nations have a gentleman's agreement to cooperate if one side is pursuing a target trying to escape past the border." (cops = city)

p. 199 "Through either Portland or Boise, regular air and bus routes are available to the SSC and Seattle." (bus stations, air fields = city)


And finally one more aspect I wanted to point you to, in case you don't know about it yet. Indiana has grabbed a little part of Illinois. See Feral Cities p. 32 "Adverse Possession" and p. 33 for the corresponding map.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 16 2013, 07:11 PM

I don't remember writing that about Boise. Hmm. OK now I need to look at that how that would work.

See this is why I started this project, to catch these things and make sure there's a detailed and consistent map everyone could use even for times when I myself want to contradict stuff I wrote in the past because I misremembered lol

edit: I dug Tir Tairngire out of storage and yup, the map clearly shows the city being partitioned. Thanks!

Posted by: lokii Jul 17 2013, 02:05 PM

Asia was a bit much. I have 135 lines from Shadowrun maps for this one, so for now I didn't put markers in. The portion of Asia beyond 180° is missing, but it just belongs to TPA. The map shows in essence the geography of Shadows of Asia which was consistent between the different maps in the book with a few minor exceptions. Most parts of Asia can be described using existing state and sub-state borders with some new lines interspersed. The longest new border line runs through Russia, it still traces a few rivers though. As I said before, whereas the Sixth World Almanac simplifies some of the SoA borders, it does not actually explain any of these changes. That is why except for Israel I used the 2064 borders for my alternate world map. Israel and Palestine are still a bit different from SWA, which reflects a change to the world map made in the German translation of the Almanac (should be confirmed with Catalyst). Anyway if nothing else this should have some "historical" value.

Also, note that I split the file because of upload size constraints of the Shadowhelix:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Konstruktionsdokumentation_Asien_1.png
http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Konstruktionsdokumentation_Asien_2.png

South America:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Konstruktionsdokumentation_Suedamerika.png

So, North America is last. Our discussion reminded me, that there are lot of spots that need reworking. But for completeness' sake I think I will provide the construction of my current state too.

And I appreciate the opportunity for an info dump. My custom stuff was never really suitable for redistribution. So it's good to have a more standardised resource.

Posted by: lokii Jul 17 2013, 10:18 PM

And North America:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Konstruktionsdokumentation_Nordamerika.png

Some info regarding the UCAS/CAS border:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Shadowhelix:Karten/Dokumentation/Staaten/United_Canadian_and_American_States

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Illustration_Aufteilung_von_Missouri.png
http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Illustration_Aufteilung_von_Virginia.png

South Florida is one of the things to be corrected:

http://www.michael.burrage.net/pages/games/shadowrun/SR-maps/sr-maps.html

So, now I will see whether I can get all my coordinate sets into a shape file.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 19 2013, 02:35 AM

I think the Tir Tairngire map takes the crown of absolutely godawful presentation and accuracy. Sure, that map of the eastern region looks ok, but then you actually stretch it out and they messed up the southern border by over 80 km because they didn't keep track of where the roads and their already drawn borders actually were. It's distorted all to hell and the eastern border doesn't even have the same SHAPE as what is shown on other maps.

Boise is a gigantic metroplex according to that map BTW. Like 8x the current size of the city. Well, this helps explain where all those SSC residents live. Did you know Missoula is on that map? Well you wouldn't because it's not labeled. Did you know that the expansion of the city was pretty much exclusively east but Caldwell, Meridian, and Nampa don't even show up? That the roads are only barely recognizable (and I drive down to Boise quite often)?

And I've traced the source of the trouble by using the MUCH better SONA maps.

Boise is in the wrong spot on most Shadowrun maps. Specifically, it's 60 kilometers off in the SONA map. What they call Boise is the town of Melba.

Adding this to the list of things to find out from on high about.

Posted by: lokii Jul 22 2013, 08:24 PM

For my maps, I think I used the coordinates of Boise as an anchor point for where the three country borders meet. Of course while the city might be divided between two countries, it certainly isn't divided between three, so maybe it would still make more sense to use the Tír map, at least in that spot. Also the highways provide a geographically well defined border. As far as I could tell (see my construction map) two freely drawn lines are otherwise needed to describe that segment of the border.

Could you add the list of open issues to your first post?

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 23 2013, 02:28 AM

-- Based on the information provided by Wak Shaani I created maps showing the area encompassed by the PCC land purchase/swap described (but not shown) in Storm Front.

PCC Land Purchase Maps
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kr36a0211g4szzo/Zef2p4w1fB


-- If you're interested, I also created two maps showing how Missouri is split between the UCAS and CAS, and the fixes I made to Virginia to show the right apportionment of counties between the UCAS and CAS.

Missouri Split Map
* Grey line is Shadowrun border.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/s4p5rfdksmpmmh9/MIssouriSplit.pdf

Virginia Split Map
* The small polygons are the counties.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7tkd53tiq79rlez/VirginiaSplit.pdf

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 23 2013, 02:50 AM

Updated the first post to describe some of the outstanding issues. Currently doing some more tweaks to show what my "final" Asamando map looks like.

You can see some Sioux Nation maps here https://www.dropbox.com/sh/pm1uw6wrc1nbptm/uA_1jcRePU

Posted by: tete Jul 23 2013, 02:59 AM

If you look at the original Seattle Source books several roads, rivers etc are in the wrong place. Later books look like they at least had a map to work off of.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 23 2013, 03:24 AM

The Enclaves map I've come to learn to live with. I just need the southern coast issue addressed (is San Diego supposed to be islands? That's not really explained in the book).

The LA map in Enclaves perfectly georectified so I'm confident that part is right.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 23 2013, 03:59 AM

Gold and Ivory Coast
Uploaded my attempted fixes and canon smoothing to https://www.dropbox.com/sh/5lwgnx0leohn71j/q4W8E4R7uN

The maps should be consistent with Feral Cities, p. 69.

-- Asante Nation changed to Kingdom of Asante (not "Assante") as in Feral Cities.

-- Anyl corrected spelling to Anyi.

-- Asamando borders consistent with Feral Cities and swallows most of the contested land seen in SWA. A rump cut-off area of the Gold and Ivory Coast Tribal Area remains in the south (labeled Contested Gold Cost Land).

-- Kingdom of Benin loses a significant amount of land but borders for both kingdoms should match what you see in Feral Cities.

-- On the region map note "Island_NearNigeria." That island has no clear ownership in canon. There's actually quite a few islands like that, and are given generic names in my geodatabase for later assignment.

-- I don't think I can georectify the Lagos map (Feral Cities, p. 93). It's too divergent from the current area to find tie points. I've attached a map showing one of my attempts as LagosNowWhat

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 23 2013, 06:45 PM

Westphalia
Updated the Westphalia area with the map from the Reiseführer (Travel Guide) sourcebook. I had to do a little surgery to get the new coastlines to match at the United Netherlands area but it wasn't too bad. Note that the sourcebook borders are not exactly matching (as you can see on the rectified image), but the other stuff matched close enough that I feel pretty good about the new coastline changes.


Westphalia Updates
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4tp5xmt5odabdsi/K6nynvBMWl

Posted by: lokii Jul 24 2013, 09:38 AM

What do you make of Shadows of North America p. 71? "All counties intersecting or to the south of a line drawn from Jasper County to Jefferson County (just south of St. Louis) became the CAS state of South Missouri (with Springfield as state capital)." That is why I simply ignored the Missouri border from all the maps and just used the counties (plus the St. Louis wedge) to create the border line.

Corporate Enclaves p. 34 "The most notable thing about San Diego is that it has turned into a city of islands."

Why do you use that as the standard, though? It does have its problems. If Asamando is expanded like this it swallows up the corporate enclaves of Bibiani (Ares) and Wenchi (Saeder-Krupp). The purple lines on this map:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Anpassung_Kernbereich_Gold-_und_Elfenbeinküste.png

Would the megacorps allow their territory to be surrounded by Asamando (assuming they have kept it) and would Thema Laula step on their toes like this? Also Feral Cities is only hinting at why Asamando expanded. The only clue I see is Feral Cities p. 74 "Any invading army is going to find the entire population turned out against them. The Asante found that out the hard way in '64 and '65." This points to an invasion by Asante that Asamando defeated. Maybe they occupied Asante territory afterwards, which would explain part of the changes on the map. But there is no explanation for the Asante's expansion towards the east. On the other hand if Asamando just expelled the Asante invasion force, there would be little need to change the map from the state in Cyberpirates! at all...

Basically all of the remaining colonial possessions could be put on the list of open issues. Just a few examples: the British Falkland Islands or Ascension Island, the French islands around Madagascar like Mayotte and Réunion. Where I see the French fighting tooth and nails to keep them, I would imagine the British either auctioned them off or permanently leased them to corporations, though there is a different precedence set with the Bermudas.

Posted by: Vicar Jul 24 2013, 03:37 PM

Sweet. Thanks for all the work (I do love me some maps).

I took a look at the Sioux maps, and really liked what I saw. A couple of questions on Sioux.pdf, though:

(Assuming the blue dots are cities)
1) There is an unlabeled blue dot between Bozeman and Hardin (Is maybe Billings?)
2) There are two blue dots in the vicinity of the Cody label
3) Two blue dots in the vicinity of the Laramie label (One of them should be Cheyenne?)
4) There is an unlabeled blue dot to the NW of Sidney, SW of Alliance
5) There is an unlabeled blue dot to the NE of Butte (I'm assuming this is Helena)

Again, thanks for all the work.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 24 2013, 05:05 PM

-- I'll send this in to the line developer to see if I can get a ruling. Right now I'm assuming the line cutting the counties is right as it's been pretty consistent over every book.


-- Yeah, but I don't think the author actually looked at it. The city is GONE. It didn't nicely get broken up and float apart.


-- The enclaves shown in Cyberpirates are not seen in SWA so I assume they are still largely corporate run or the corps left or who knows
-- I'm willing to bet money that the word from God on this is going to be something like "borders change all the time there." So don't get too wedded to the lines I have up there now, even if it gets blessed.

-- Based on the Cyberpirates fluff I actually assume its more like "Asamando claims this area, no one is powerful enough to press their own claim, so on a map suddenly it's marked "Asamando."

-- I couldn't find anything about who "owns" the Falklands. A lot of those islands, even big ones, don't get borders drawn around them

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 24 2013, 06:09 PM

Ok I sent in a list of questions to Jason Hardy on some of the more outstanding issues.

-- I've made a less busy map showing the borders and cities (and fixed some of the labeling issues - it was not drawing labels that overlapped).

Sioux Region - Cities: https://www.dropbox.com/s/duhc6w75vaczx14/Sioux-Cities.pdf
-- The light grey lines are the current state and national borders.

Sioux Region - Cities With Terrain Background: https://www.dropbox.com/s/j2deqabiioaqi8a/Sioux-Cities_Terrain.pdf
-- I like how this looks so will probably keep that background on the other city overview maps.

Posted by: lokii Jul 24 2013, 09:16 PM

The main advantage is the cleanly defined geographic structure. Anyway there would still be my maps as kind of a "minority opinion".

Or you could be blamed for every mistake on the maps in perpetuity.

Well, with Feral Cities you get the impression Asamando is a functioning state with a highly educated workforce and an efficient army, just run by ghouls.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 24 2013, 10:01 PM

-- True. And it wouldn't be hard to update using the actual county borders (one of the nice things about having it all in a GIS is I can trace the legal borders).
-- It's one of the questions I sent in to the line developer. Jason quickly responded saying he would look at it after GenCon was all over

-- At least my maps will be consistently wrong, which is a big improvement over the current state of affairs.

-- Aye. It's a weird place. Take a look at where they supposedly have their capital on Google Earth (there's nothing really there atm in real life). Not the best spot one could imagine. How all that stuff works and they don't even have a port is rather astonishing.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 25 2013, 12:56 AM

I've uploaded additional sets of maps to https://www.dropbox.com/sh/07i5ony0enrg9nc/_AeouepmBy

The Shattered Coast maps are a closer look at the Corporate Enclaves flooding. I've also shown it overlayed on actual DEMs to illustrate how completely arbitrary the whole thing is.

As always, I take requests (as long as its not too elaborate).

Edit: On the DEM maps you can toggle off the SR Nations layer to see the full DEM. Which actually will just leave you with more questions than it answers, but that functionality is included in all of these GeoPDFs.

Posted by: lokii Jul 25 2013, 08:28 PM

Looking at my Denver stuff I remembered something else, that I never got around to fix. The old Denver map, that was republished as a black/white graphic in SoNA, shows that the western border of Denver follows existing secondary roads. I did try to register it, but I didn't quite succeed. If you haven't done so already and you have access to the roads, that would be a good opportunity to get a very precise fit of part of the FRFZ border.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 26 2013, 01:02 AM

Will update the Denver borders.

Using lokii's XY data, so far I've done the following:

Adjusted the borders of Mauritania, Algeria, and Morocco.

Adjusted/fixed the Sheba southern border with the Ethiomalian Territories (ouch that one was a big error!).

Adjusted the Iraq/Kurdistan border. I don't think these borders were really given much thought, so making some changes to follow recognizable landmarks (notably, roads). It appears the Kirkuk area is under Iraqi control so decided not to use lokii's borders in that area. I think that keeping the As Sulaymaniyah region in Iraq territory looks closer to what is in SWA for this area. The Raniyah spur got cot off for Kurdistan but is probably disputed territory (more than most in that area). I've uploaded a map of the area to https://www.dropbox.com/s/pvy67tqvc22w3fu/Kurdistan.pdf

Posted by: lokii Jul 26 2013, 07:29 AM

What I forgot to say. No guarantees. Well, I'm confident about the general positioning of lines, but I'm sure there will be small errors in the placement. On the other hand most of the new borders are very rough anyway. For Africa I think I got a good fit with the Almanac map once I ignored the underlying shape from the satellite image and just matched borders.

Which reminds me of yet another thing. The Almanac map shows a pretty dramatic expansion of the jungle, the whole southern Sahara is overgrown. That should probably be dialed back. I'm not sure it ever was that densely covered by jungle.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 26 2013, 06:56 PM

-- The Almanac basemap appears to be the Blue Marble Next Generation graphic. So that's not a Shadowrun edit

EDIT: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_cat.php?categoryID=1484

Posted by: lokii Jul 26 2013, 10:02 PM

You are right about Blue Marble, but compare the image to the Almanac map. The latitude of the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula is were the Sahel zone ends today. But on the Almanac map what appears to be vegetation reaches to the latitude of the northern end of the Red Sea. That's several million square kilometers. The vegetation has also extended south.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 26 2013, 10:27 PM

Ah, ok I see what you mean. Yeah, vegetation was probably clonestamped all over the place. Will add that to my list of questions

Edit: Oh, and Madagascar (which canonically does have a spooky super-regrow forest) doesn't have one on the map

Posted by: lokii Jul 26 2013, 11:08 PM

In exchange it got a capital (which canonically it doesn't have).

For my Africa map (http://shadowrun.wikia.com/wiki/File:Map_africa.jpg) I used a mixture of two different public domain images from Natural Earth as a base map:

http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-raster-data/10m-natural-earth-1/
http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-raster-data/10m-natural-earth-2/

The second one, Natural Earth II, is an idealized version of the earth without the influence of human settlement. The Sahara is still pretty much vegetation free on that map. I put the two images together using Natural Earth I outside the tribal areas and Natural Earth II for Congo, Madagascar and a few other places. But I didn't really work from canon references, except with Madagascar.

Posted by: lokii Jul 28 2013, 10:52 AM

I had a look at your North America 2075 map. I assume you'll still put the new northern coast of the Baja California ex-peninsula in. So the only other thing I noticed Newfoundland should be part of the UCAS (unless I missed this territorial change). It belongs to Maine to be specific (originally in NAGNA, recently confirmed in Dirty Tricks).

And one more from my resurfacing memories: A few roads I considered using as a border but never got around to try it out, are Trans-Canada highways for the AMC-UCAS border. I think that border was originally meant to follow certain Trans-Canada highways from the east up to the point were the border turns south to connect with the Sioux Nation border. In order from the east it should be described by:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_11
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_17
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manitoba_Highway_1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskatchewan_Highway_1

I don't believe it works out over the whole border, but maybe some parts could be substituted with highway lines. So something to consider.

A few notes on outstanding issues.

South Florida: At least the map that accompanied the Second Edition shows that the border reaches up to West Palm Beach. It also hugs close to the coast. I think the solution of MJBurrage is better since it considers the description in Cyberpirates!

Aztlan/Amazonia: I would still be interested in the historic border (2050 to mid 2070s). Aztlan p. 106 has the description I based my http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:Aztlan-Amazonien-Grenzverlauf-Korrektur.png on, but it also has a map that shows the start of the border line from Lake Maracaibo, not the complete border though.

German coast: The Westphalia map looks as if it would fit better, if it is slightly rotated. I don't know if you tried that. Some of the Shadowrun maps appear to be rotated for optics or something.


Finally, if you are up for it, at the end of this process I would really love to have a list of changes in comparison to older maps (and descriptions of borders). Something that says these changes are retcons, but these changes are the result of events in the Sixth World, even if they have not yet been described.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 28 2013, 07:44 PM

Newfoundland should be in the UCAS.

One thing these maps show is how illogical the CAS complaint about "pliant Canadian politicians" was. Canada got reduced to a tiny little fraction of its former land.

The AMC northern border follows the roads where possible. I made a similar change to the UCAS/CAS border.

The Sioux/UCAS border was similarly modified a bit to follow the natural features and roads that it was obviously attached to. (I suspect the first Shadowrun map was sketched on a road atlas.) I'll double-check what roads I used.

I made some small changes to the Denver western border to fix any egregious differences from the roads that it follows, but kept it a bit abstract as it just gets washed out at the lower resolutions.

This is a question I have in queue with the line developer.

The SWA borders don't appear to even include Cali (and I used the SWA for these borders). Obviously this entire area gets a massive change in 2075. I'm not entirely sure where the 2050 border would be, I will have to look that up.

I'm basically brute forcing some of these graphics as I don't know what projection they were created in (if any). If it was just scale/rotation then two tie points would fix it, but some of the smaller maps are in local coordinate systems of unknown type (probably based on atlas maps or road maps that were then redrawn in Illustrator). That's why you can see some of the georectified images get shifted into "trumpet shapes" and such - they're being shown in Web Mercator (which is my editing coordinate system).

Aye, I can do that.

Posted by: lokii Jul 28 2013, 10:50 PM

Yep, this has come up before. Some people (Ontarians presumedly) countered it with the argument, that Ontario is really all you need. To their credit they back the claim up. This post and the ones following it:

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=32987&view=findpost&p=993713

Well, as I said before the Sioux/UCAS border is based on the border between two timezones, I guess therefore it is also aligned with roads and as shown in my construction map I described it in part with county borders. If you want to compare with the time zones, here is a shape file: http://efele.net/maps/tz/world/

That was actually why I noticed the discrepancies with the border. According to War! Cali was in Aztlan, but the map in the 20th Anniversary Edition where I took the border line from (probably the Almanac too) implied that it was in Amazonia. The description in the Aztlan sourcebook is clear though, the border runs 50 kilometers south of Cali and the city is mentioned for its military base I believe. I'm interested in the correction mainly to update the animated maps. And while I can come up with something myself of course, I would rather use the official/semiofficial corrected version, if you are interested in also tackling that problem.

By the way, do you still plan to have the Sixth World geographic reference publicly available as a shape file or in a similar format, once everything is done? I realize the data file can become pretty big. Personally, I don't need the normal islands or coasts, but the new structures and the adjusted border lines would be nice to have as data.

Should have said that earlier. Thank you for your effort. I have bemoaned the map situation for so long. Maybe I can find something new to complain about now.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 28 2013, 11:28 PM

-- I'm not sure it actually ever matched the timezones. I'm overlaying the Natural Earth timezone layer and it sorta matches in some areas but not in others.

-- I took it offline because I was/am doing some heavy edits in some areas (I just changed a big chunk of western the Denver zone based on a really close look at the Denver box set maps, for example)

-- I'm getting pretty happy with the borders so will be exporting the polygons to a line file and then removing the coastline elements so it's just borders (which will be more convenient for overlaying on Google I think).

-- I can upload another dump of the current geodatabase after I do another round of topology checks (I despise overlapping borders!). I'll upload it as a shapefile and KML. If you want another format let me know. The polygon layer should be online at the dropbox within the hour.


-- It won't ever make total sense. The Shadowrun borders will follow natural breaks and roads (which is itself sort of problematic when you think about it, since usually that means the road centerline is a border) and then suddenly veers off in a straight line ignoring everything for hundreds of kilometers, then joins back up with a road and traces that again. It's actually a bit maddening

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 29 2013, 12:08 AM

Oops you were right I had Newfoundland as part of Quebec! Fixed that.

Posted by: lokii Jul 30 2013, 09:15 PM

I think it is an exaggerated form of the timezone border, used as a orientation but maybe not correctly positioned. So it's probably irrelevant for our purposes. I'll try it out myself, once I have found my way around Quantum GIS for extracting single coordinate sets from shape files. Then I can also have a look at your shape file.

Though your SR_Nations.shp isn't as big as I would have thought, considering all the structures in there.

But I didn't see that you already had the new Baja California lines in the map. The passage is so narrow, that I couldn't distinguish it from the background because of the grey borders. I think the gap does look a bit wider on the Shadowrun Anniversary North America map but of course Corporate Enclaves' is much more detailed. Though I have to say the borders seem overly zigzaggy, almost like splintered glass.

Posted by: Tzeentch Jul 30 2013, 11:05 PM

-- I think that was intentional. The shape and extent of the sundering is something I have in the hopper for the line developer to give a Word of God on. It may just be effectively retconned as bad cartography and temporary flooding.

Posted by: lokii Aug 3 2013, 06:04 PM

For completeness sake the border of Trans-Polar Aleut Nation has two main problems in the Sixth World Almanac: North America (goes back to the Shadows of North America map) and Asia where it does not quite follow older maps. In general the T-PA border keeps within the polar circle or about 66° latitude North. This can be seen in Target:Wastelands p. 55 or on http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Datei:GeoPositionskarte_Trans-Polar_Aleut.png. The map in Shadows of North America p. 33 shows that the border between Athabaska and T-PA is labeled with "Polar circle" unfortunately the actual border doesn't follow the circle. It should be a straight line for this projection. Since then this wrong line has been copied to new maps. A comparison between Shadows of Asia maps and the one from Target: Wastelands reveals some inconsistencies between both sources (border and controlled islands). I resolved this favoring SoA, but I think mainly because its maps were easier to work with at that point.

Posted by: Tzeentch Aug 3 2013, 07:14 PM

Aye, it should probably follow the Arctic Circle.

The Yakut/TPA inconsistencies I think I'll explain as everyone just guessing where the border really is as neither side runs land surveyors out there or has an official treaty. I updated a Google KML of the latest border linework file (North America is covered) and the nations shapes yesterday. I also uploaded the latest export of the nations shapefile. I've been busy with editing my annotations to create something that looks like the "SWA style." For example: https://www.dropbox.com/s/jd4m9v6budfjq0o/test_NW.pdf

Posted by: lokii Aug 4 2013, 09:59 AM

But the border was created in 2018 with Russia on the other side. I suspect that they cared about it.

I think I solved one inconsistency between T:WL and SoA with the map on Target: Smuggler Havens p. 32. Both actually use that map as a base, but in T:WL for the western border of the Asian portion of T-PA the border line between Yakut and Russia was used instead of that between Yakut and T-PA (I assume by mistake).

Also, I noticed for that border I mislabeled the file with longitude/latitude coordinates I gave you. It is called "adm0_na_Yakut--Trans-Polar_Aleut.csv" but should be "as" instead. The border not only (roughly) follows the polar circle also the "indent" in the border is based on real world geography, the shape is created by two rivers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omolon_River and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolyma_River.


By the way, I added a few more instances of your "Alter Ego" http://www.shadowhelix.de/Kzeentch weighing in. One of them right next to the T-PA map in Target: Wastelands. That should make you something of an expert.

Posted by: lokii Feb 15 2015, 05:38 PM

I put this here as a footnote, why the Almanac's simplifications shouldn't be the last word on Asian geography. If there ever is another word...

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=32987&view=findpost&p=1308811

Posted by: BaronJ Feb 25 2015, 10:15 PM

Just following up on this ancient thread; I'm amazed and awed by the amount of work you all plied into this! I miss Dumpshock now!

However, it looks like a lot of Tzeentch's dropbox files aren't responding. Are the results of all of this work living over on the Shadowhelix these days?

Posted by: lokii Feb 27 2015, 11:13 AM

Well, not the things Tzeentch produced. You have to contact him about those. But all the different maps and other information I linked to in this thread should still be in the Shadowhelix. In general either the following category:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Kategorie:!Bilder/Karten

or this portal page:

http://shadowhelix.pegasus.de/Shadowhelix:Karten

are good entry points for all the map stuff in the wiki ('Karte' is the German word for map).

Posted by: hermit Aug 26 2015, 04:22 PM

Whatever happened to the new North America map?