re. Creating random (but believable) geographies
On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Darren Norris <doon75 at hotmail.com> wrote:
how about simply using what already exists? For example, Brazil [data freely available (but may need to cite the source which may defeat what you are trying to achieve?) at: ftp://geoftp.ibge.gov.br/mapas/malhas_digitais/municipio_2005/E500/Proj_Geografica/ArcView_shp/ ] has three sub-administrative layers (region, state, municipality). overlay a random polygon of your new country somewhere in the country (should be big enough) and you will end up with at least 2 administrative layers? If you want can then shift the coordinates to any location (ocean, middle of a desert etc)...... What am I missing?
That's an idea, but someone *might* recognise their state boundaries, even shifted into the Atlantic and maybe even rotated and given a silly name. I just like the idea of creating totally fictitious regions! That's another interesting problem - creating fake names for regions. I suppose you could have a set of prefixes and suffixes and join them randomly... Reminds me of the time a few years ago I did a quiz round by printing country and UK county outlines onto paper and cutting the paper into circles so nobody knew where north was. It did confuse people... Barry