Grid Cartographer 4 Free Download [portable]
Lutero Chaloux
RT: I also chuckled a bit because the map also shows some pitfalls we often see when designing real-world basemaps as well. Showing duplicate labels so close together in a single feature is something cartographers encounter when making web maps, often occurring on large area features like parks or lakes, which is exactly what we see in the labels for Lake Hylia. Not even the advanced technology of the Sheikah people solved the problem of duplicate labels!
Grid Cartographer 4 Free Download [portable]
RT: For instance, if Link needs to cross a ravine, they provide you with a variety of options to solve that: a tree nearby that you could cut and use as a bridge; grass that could be set on fire to create an updraft to help you glide to the other side. Nintendo not only accounts for all the ways a player might try to overcome a challenge, they want players to be creative!
In interaction design, Jakob Nielsen coined this principle as flexibility, and we certainly see it here, as players have multiple ways of accomplishing the same goal through both the start-menu map interface and the scope, with each avenue having benefits for different situations in the game.
AB: I also want to point out how beautiful the marginalia of the Sheikah Slate is and how the subtle visual details like this further the immersion by appearing as if you are using the slate when playing the Switch.
AB: It also helps that elevation change is highlighted by different shades of brown, with darker colors representing the lowest elevations and lighter colors on the mountain tops. Combining all of these techniques make the map easier to understand and generally more interesting to look at.
At the start of the game, the map is completely obscured by a textured grid and the faint, amorphous outlines of what appear to be regional boundaries. As you unlock Sheikah Towers and reveal regions of the map, a plethora of geographical data appears to guide you.
RT: A key part to exploration and completing the map is through unlocking Sheikah Towers, tall structures that Link can climb to download map data for the region and get a good view of the surrounding landscape.
AB: One really fun exception to this binary completion are the icons for towers and shrines. Since both of these have an interactive component (towers need to be scaled and unlocked; shrines have puzzles that need to be solved) Nintendo created an additional icon state for locations that have been discovered but not completed.
To indicate this incomplete state, a portion of the icon glows orange and upon completion the icon changes to blue. You can also see this color change on the towers and shrines in-game. Designing the in-game locations to share the same design language as the map markers is a really nice touch.
AB: I particularly enjoyed the mechanics given to players to build your own map experience though custom map marker placement and how the game constantly mixes up repetitive tasks needed to complete the map by introducing new obstacles, enemy types, and player abilities.
Stamen is a globally recognized strategic design partner and one of the most established cartography and data visualization studios in the industry. For over two decades, Stamen has been helping industry giants, universities, and civic-minded organizations alike bring their ideas to life through designing and storytelling with data. We specialize in translating raw data into interactive visuals that inform, inspire and incite action. At the heart of this is our commitment to research and ensuring we understand the challenges we face. We embrace ambiguity, we thrive in data, and we exist to build tools that educate and inspire our audiences to act.
The history of cartography refers to the development and consequences of cartography, or mapmaking technology, throughout human history. Maps have been one of the most important human inventions for millennia, allowing humans to explain and navigate their way through the world.
When and how the earliest maps were made is unclear, but maps of local terrain are believed to have been independently invented by many cultures. The earliest surviving maps include cave paintings and etchings on tusk and stone. Maps were produced extensively by ancient Babylon, Greece, Rome, China, and India.
The earliest maps ignored the curvature of Earth's surface, both because the shape of the Earth was uncertain and because the curvature is not important across the small areas being mapped. However, since the age of Classical Greece, maps of large regions, and especially of the world, have used projection from a model globe to control how the inevitable distortion gets apportioned on the map.
Modern methods of transportation, the use of surveillance aircraft, and more recently the availability of satellite imagery have made documentation of many areas possible that were previously inaccessible. Free online services such as Google Earth have made accurate maps of the world more accessible than ever before.
It is not always clear whether an ancient artifact had been wrought as a map or as something else. The definition of "map" is also not precise. Thus, no single artifact is generally accepted to be the earliest surviving map. Candidates include:
Additional statements about ancient geography are found in Hesiod's poems, probably written during the 8th century BC.[19] Through the lyrics of Works and Days and Theogony, he shows to his contemporaries some definite geographical knowledge. He introduces the names of such rivers as Nile, Ister (Danube), the shores of the Bosporus and the Euxine (Black Sea), the coast of Gaul, the island of Sicily, and a few other regions and rivers.[20] His advanced geographical knowledge not only had predated Greek colonial expansions, but also was used in the earliest Greek world maps, produced by Greek mapmakers such as Anaximander and Hecataeus of Miletus, and Ptolemy using both observations by explorers and a mathematical approach.
Anaximenes of Miletus (6th century BC), who studied under Anaximander, rejected the views of his teacher regarding the shape of the Earth and instead, he visualized the Earth as a rectangular form supported by compressed air.
The way in which the geographical knowledge of the Greeks advanced from the previous assumptions of the Earth's shape was through Herodotus and his conceptual view of the world. This map also did not survive and many have speculated that it was never produced. A possible reconstruction of his map is displayed below.
Herodotus traveled extensively, collecting information and documenting his findings in his books on Europe, Asia, and Libya. He also combined his knowledge with what he learned from the people he met. Herodotus wrote his Histories in the mid-5th century BC. Although his work was dedicated to the story of long struggle of the Greeks with the Persian Empire, Herodotus also included everything he knew about the geography, history, and peoples of the world. Thus, his work provides a detailed picture of the known world of the 5th century BC.
Herodotus rejected the prevailing view of most 5th-century BC maps that the Earth is a disk surrounded by ocean. In his work he describes the Earth as an irregular shape with oceans surrounding only Asia and Africa. He introduces names such as the Atlantic Sea, and the Erythrean Sea, which translates as the "Red Sea". He also divided the world into three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. He depicted the boundary of Europe as the line from the Pillars of Hercules through the Bosphorus and the area between the Caspian Sea and the Indus River. He regarded the Nile as the boundary between Asia and Africa. He speculated that the extent of Europe was much greater than was assumed at the time and left Europe's shape to be determined by future research.
In the case of Africa, he believed that, except for the small stretch of land in the vicinity of Suez, the continent was in fact surrounded by water. However, he definitely disagreed with his predecessors and contemporaries about its presumed circular shape. He based his theory on the story of Pharaoh Necho II, the ruler of Egypt between 609 and 594 BC, who had sent Phoenicians to circumnavigate Africa. Apparently, it took them three years, but they certainly did prove his idea. He speculated that the Nile River started as far west as the Ister River (Danube) in Europe and cut Africa through the middle. He was the first writer to assume that the Caspian Sea was separated from other seas and he recognised northern Scythia as one of the coldest inhabited lands in the world.
Similar to his predecessors, Herodotus also made mistakes. He accepted a clear distinction between the civilized Greeks in the center of the Earth and the barbarians on the world's edges. In his Histories it is clear that he believed that the world became stranger and stranger when one traveled away from Greece, until one reached the ends of the Earth, where humans behaved as savages.
Pomponius Mela is unique among ancient geographers in that, after dividing the earth into five zones, of which two only were habitable, he asserts the existence of antichthones, inhabiting the southern temperate zone inaccessible to the folk of the northern temperate regions from the unbearable heat of the intervening torrid belt. On the divisions and boundaries of Europe, Asia and Africa, he repeats Eratosthenes; like all classical geographers from Alexander the Great (except Ptolemy) he regards the Caspian Sea as an inlet of the Northern Ocean, corresponding to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea on the south.
Marinus's geographical treatise is lost and known only from Ptolemy's remarks. He introduced improvements to the construction of maps and developed a system of nautical charts. His chief legacy is that he first assigned to each place a proper latitude and longitude. His zero meridian ran through the westernmost land known to him, the Isles of the Blessed around the location of the Canary or Cape Verde Islands. He used the parallel of Rhodes for measurements of latitude. Ptolemy mentions several revisions of Marinus's geographical work, which is often dated to AD 114 although this is uncertain. Marinus estimated a length of 180,000 stadia for the equator, roughly corresponding[a] to a circumference of the Earth of 33,300 km, about 17% less than the actual value.
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