Comparing Maps
The GPS Mission Designer now offers a variety of maps
To create a GPS Mission others can play, anyone can use the online GPS Mission Designer. By placing symbols on a digital map, checkpoints are generated, places players have to visit. As Jörn announced in the forum, the mission designer now offers a whole variety of maps to choose from. I think this can be extremely helpful, especially when designing offroad missions like e.g. the virtual mushrooms. It´s pretty amazing how different the same place (I chose a section of the Stadtwald in Karlsruhe) looks like on different maps (see below).
While the virtual earth map won´t really help when one wants to place a mission in the woods, the satellite pictures are more useful for it. If unfamiliar with the place (as I often am, placing missions all over the world) one can see that it´s a wood, a fact one would not guess from looking at the white space the roads go through on the virtual earth map. The two satellite pictures showing the same place still are quite different since they obviously have been taken in different seasons. The green forest on the virtual earth satellite picture looks really nice, but the google picture, taken in winter times, is much more helpful since one gets an idea where there is trails through this wood.But comparing this with the openstreetmap (a user generated open source map I already mentioned the other day) there is another surprise: There seem to be a lot more trails than one can possibly guess from looking at the satellite pictures. Which is, of course, very useful information for designing a mission - even if one is familiar with those trails.
Thanks to all those volunteer cartographers mapping footpaths in the woods of Karlsruhe! And it´s not only in Karlsruhe, that this map is much more detailed and better suited for the needs of pedestrians than its commercial counterparts. There is a very nice site for comparing Google maps with the openstreetmap providing a slider from one to the other. I came across it reading this article by Peter Eich who deploys the openstreetmap into mapping projects like bikemap.
So let´s use all these maps for making great missions!
