Sections

  1. Hi There!
  2. What is Lankarta Project?
  3. My plan
  4. My actual skillset
  5. Work progress
  6. Why building new app when there are many good ones?
  7. Why do I need all of this?
  8. What am I up to IRL?

Hi There!

My name is Thomas and I'm from Poland 🇵🇱🇪🇺. Sorry for generic looking site (totally not inspired by early facebook), it's better than at the beginning tho, I need to sit down, open the computer and do some logo and nice graphics to this site, writing on mobile is slow, making graphics is totally inconvenient.

This is my personal website that I've just started in 27th July 2024 thanks to this video of You've Got Kat youtube channel, thank you so much, I like the simplicity of the webpage editor and freedom to write whatever html/css/js stuff without any template!

I would also like to give a shoutout to the author of another, but much smaller youtuber Geofiction which, because of this video (and the entire channel), inspired me to put out my hand-drawn fictional maps into the internet!

I guess I'll never make that page look even remotely finished because of my crippling laziness, lots of house chores and my job. However, I am really yearning to make some nice IT project that would finally be usable. Also I was recently way too much focused on 2024 US Elections which I watched like the biggest drama in the world.

What is Lankarta Project?

Lankarta™ is a concept of a bundle of software that allows users to easily create, edit and organize maps in any web browser. The main difference between the existing GIS software and Lankarta is that my project will be more adapted to creation of fictional or fantasy maps and will skip some of the more advanced features and plugins that are used in real life spatial work, so will be easy to use enough to create convincing maps, but would also be very convenient for drawing real life maps. The app will be a made in web technologies to be cross-platform and so can everyone put that app on any server and run the app localy or remotely.

My intention is to make it fully open source so everyone can use and modify it. Obviously there is no way in hell I would build all the features that I want by myself, but rather it will be build with various open source tools and libraries.

List of Features

I have many ideas but I struggle to organize them so this list will always be changing and rephrasing.

Elementary Features

Content Packages

Procedural Generators

Features almost useless in real life scenarios, procedural generation is the best way to speed up development of convincing ficitonal maps. Drawing everything by hand is time consuming and mostly not desirable as many people would rather focus on other aspects of map making than height map consistency, tectonic plates mechanics, realistic water bodies behavior etc. Also the procedural generation of settlements would be a great way to start off creating realistic history of a fictional city, you start with a bunch of natural looking autogenerated paths and villages, then expanding them or leaving as the regional context of the fully planned city.

Simulators

Modules that can conduct simulations on maps will be the hardest one to make. I don't think I would ever be able to compete with professional GIS software in the field of real traffic simulations, so I think simplified simulations tailored to making games in fictional scenarios will already be a great achievement.

Web Platform

The whole Lankarta app will probably written as a web app, that can work on computers as offline servers. Anybody can launch and host its own online server to invite others to collaborate, create common maps and simulations.

3D View and Decorators

Fully 3D view of a map maker is way too complex and tedious to make, if Paradox Interactive is struggling to make it, I have no chance. What I see as a great idea is to use some lightweight AI image generator model to generate sattelite images out of regular maps. It doesn't have to be some ultra full AI, the whole process needs basic steps like putting textures on vectors and using AI generator to add some random details and mesh repeating textures.

User Interface

The app's UI would be basically a blend of iD Editor (in-browser editor of Openstreetmap.org), Cities Skylines (many people are familiar with its interface) and some elements of SimCity4 (I know that is silly but that's my favourite city builder when it comes to user experience). I want it to be simple enough to use for non-nerds of GIS software like QGIS or ArcGIS and be more better suited for creating fictional and fantasy maps.

Recently I tried out drawing some tiny maps in OpenGeoFiction.org, but although the map editor is quite nice, it's a bit tedious to make large scale maps. One of the key differences between iD Editor and my idea is that I would like to be able to have built-in collection of ploppable buildings, interchanges, compounds etc. that in iD everything must be drawn separately. Maybe JOSM (Java OpenStreetMap Editor) have better feautures but it's even more convoluted than QGIS (or I'm just dumb which is likely).

My plan

Keep trying to be focused and just coding once in a while.

In the meantime, updating this silly webpage to experiment with CSS and organizing my thoughts.

Technologies

My actuall skillset

Not so great to be frank, I've tried everything, but I'm not completely fluent in any of those technologies, but with enough time, commitment and perhaps pestering AI chatbots with programming questions I might get a hand on some nice languages and apps.

Work progress

As of right now it's just an idea and my childhood dream and probably it will stay that way, sadly I barely ever finish anything. I still got nothing other than the concept of a plan. I would probably eventually just settle on drawing maps in Inkscape if I find some extenstion to draw multi-lane roads with a single path, but I will always dream "slightly" bigger.

Why building new app when there are many good ones?

The other options are:

  1. Actual GIS software
    1. QGIS - I have done something with it
    2. ArcGis - I know nothing about it
  2. Simple, data driven map makers like Mapchart, MS Excel or some other online map generators
  3. Good vector or raster graphic editors
    1. Photoshop/Ilustrator/other Adobe apps
    2. Gimp/Inkscape/other open source apps - I used these and if I knew how to use extensions (python crashes on my default setup for some reason) and create my own, these two programs would be almost exactly what I want to make static, raster, vector and/or clickable maps.
    3. Paint.net, MS Paint (now with layers!) and others
    4. Canva, Inkarnate and other web apps
  4. City/World building games
    1. Cities Skylines 1 or 2
    2. SimCity, most notably SimCity4 Rush Hour with NAM - the enchanced stats are great, but building blocks puzzles are puzzling to build and sometimes crashing the game
    3. Junxions - recently announced traffic simulator that looks very promising!
    4. City Bus Manager - fairly new game not for creating maps but for ogranizing bus network on maps of real cities, a friendly interface for drawing bus routes on maps is the feature I wish I would have
    5. TheoTown, OpenTTD or other PC/Mobile economy/city-building game
  5. Or just paper, pencil, ruller maybe and a bunch of kid crayolas again...

I am sure I missed a lot of good apps or games that could help me design some very detailed maps, but the point is, I would like to have something that would be as customizable for my ideas as possible.

Why do I need all of this?

I just like drawing maps, both real and fictional, on paper, but since I installed Google Earth for the first time (from DVD disc featured in Google apps book guide, long time ago, back when Google SketchUp was still maintained, good times!) I always wanted to be able to create my own zoomable, interactive maps. All the app that I tried were either too complicated (QGIS is just too much without proper study), not interactive enough (all graphic software, Inkscape is the closest to interactive maps but not that good) or too simplistic (Mapchart, Paint and other simplest approaches).

If this whole project ever get any good it might even contribute to my CV, which would be very surprising.

What am I up to IRL

My new family!

Nowadays, my main "project" is the real life which is a bit exhausing but full of sweet and joyous moments since I have my wife and baby daughter ❤️

My world tour :)

But before I become completely enveloped by my new family life, I used to travel quite extensively across Europe! The only time I step outside my home subcontinent I've been in Tunisia once, and almost got to Turkiye, but I was apparently too young for a brief tour to Istanbul, imma get there somehow and someday! Other non-European countries also look promising and achievable, like Georgia which is very easy to enter for Poles as they like us there, lots of cheap flights and we can enter with ID card instead of a passport!

For some reason the flags emoji don't show up on browser based on Webkit, like Opera, but in Firefox (my daily browser) work fine. I have to fix that with some javascript hack and external emoji pack.

I was there

PL
EU
SK
HU
CZ
DE
FR
AD
ES
PT
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿
NL
BE
CH
AT
SI
IT
VA
TN
HR
RS
MK
BG
GR
DK
SE
LT

I would like to visit

RO
MD
UA
LV
EE
FI
IS
LU
SM
MT
IE
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿
GE
CY
TR
AL
AM

I wish I could visit

CA
US
AU
NZ
NR
AR
UY
CL
CO
MA
BW
JP
TW
KR
HK
VN
MY
SG
PH
TH
KG
AE
And more but those are the major ones...

I'm interested but a bit worried

MX
IN
LK
GH
NG

I might, but under a very different circumstances

RU
BY
CN
KP
IL
PS
LB
EG
IR
ZA