My name is Thomas and I'm from Poland 🇵🇱🇪🇺. Sorry for generic looking site, 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 so far!
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.
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.
But anyway, Lankarta™ would be the map designer and, in some future, a platform for organizing and sharing them. It would include many features, scheduled into three development stages:
Stage 1 - Map Editor Essentials
Stage 2 - Games and Simulations
Stage 3 - Web Platform
And some more that I don't even conceived yet...
Stage 4 - 3D View and Decoration
Obviously there is no way in hell I would build all those features by myself, but rather Lankarta would be an integrated environment made of various tools and libraries. The maps could be saved in real spatial data formats (probably some version of geojson) and the app is meant to be fully open source. The app's UI would be basically a blend of iD Editor (in-browser editor of Openstreetmap.org) and 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
Or I would 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.
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).
One of the key feature of that project app would be the network map editor. Imagine that you have a bunch of maps of cities and you want to organize them like icons on the desktop. The editor would allow to make and edit multiple layers of background images, plop your map icons that could have different styles and sizes and connect them with virtual roads and other lines. The first usecase for such editor I thought about was the virtual network of cities saved as .sc4 files (SimCity4) where the cities don't have to be next to each other on the grid, but rather are freely placed like icons that are different depending of the population and might be connected by curvy roads and railroads in and out of the cities, with the posibility of creating outer ringroads.
Anyway I haven't done anything completed with that so far.
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.
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.
The other options are:
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.
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.
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 ❤️
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.