4 ms·

Show HN: Interactive maps of three historical conflicts

8 points by mookey 5y ago

geoffbrown2014 5y ago
My son is very into tabletop warfare and he loves it! He's a big Punic War fan.
- mookey 5y ago
  He has great taste! It said that Hannibal's father made him swear that he would "never be a friend of Rome" (Polybius). It led to the Second Punic War. So, you know, perhaps go easy on your son regarding that whole "taking oaths" thing, okey?
randomluck040 5y ago
Hey there! I really like the interactive maps. Would you mind elaborate on how you did them? I thought of something comparable but have no front end experience, I basically wanted to tell a story by pointing at specific parts of the map.
- mookey 5y ago
  Thanks! It's without a doubt a pretty painful process. I'm using d3.js (https://d3js.org https://d3js.org) for projecting a vector representation of a specific area. There is a lot of great tutorials / videos out there so a good starting point is probably just to search for e.g. "d3.js maps". D3.js might seem overwhelming at first, at least it did for me, don't let that discourage you. There are many vector sets where existing countries are already present but in my case I have to plot the highlighted map areas on my own. For that I use QGIS (https://www.qgis.org/en/site/ https://www.qgis.org/en/site/), then just save those areas in a vector file and project them onto the map. I guess that's the basics. I have spent many, many hours generating/mapping the background image, pruning the data files from redundant information, repositioning tooltips after a zoom, etc, but perhaps you don't have to, so cross that bridge when you get there.
  - randomluck040 5y ago
    Sorry for answering this late and thanks a lot for the recommendation. I'll definitely take a look at d3js.org since our current solution works on top of a geoserver which has performance issues when we try to load rather large polygons and working with it is a frustrating process overall. The learning curve for the current solutions we have was steep as well so I'm not too scared (yet haha). Thank you!
coolgeek 5y ago
I haven't had time to dig deeply in to this yet, but it looks very nice!
- mookey 5y ago
  Thank you! I appreciate it.

8 points by mookey 5y ago

geoffbrown2014 5y ago

My son is very into tabletop warfare and he loves it! He's a big Punic War fan.

mookey 5y ago
He has great taste! It said that Hannibal's father made him swear that he would "never be a friend of Rome" (Polybius). It led to the Second Punic War. So, you know, perhaps go easy on your son regarding that whole "taking oaths" thing, okey?

randomluck040 5y ago

Hey there! I really like the interactive maps. Would you mind elaborate on how you did them? I thought of something comparable but have no front end experience, I basically wanted to tell a story by pointing at specific parts of the map.

mookey 5y ago
Thanks! It's without a doubt a pretty painful process. I'm using d3.js (https://d3js.org https://d3js.org) for projecting a vector representation of a specific area. There is a lot of great tutorials / videos out there so a good starting point is probably just to search for e.g. "d3.js maps". D3.js might seem overwhelming at first, at least it did for me, don't let that discourage you. There are many vector sets where existing countries are already present but in my case I have to plot the highlighted map areas on my own. For that I use QGIS (https://www.qgis.org/en/site/ https://www.qgis.org/en/site/), then just save those areas in a vector file and project them onto the map. I guess that's the basics. I have spent many, many hours generating/mapping the background image, pruning the data files from redundant information, repositioning tooltips after a zoom, etc, but perhaps you don't have to, so cross that bridge when you get there.
- randomluck040 5y ago
  Sorry for answering this late and thanks a lot for the recommendation. I'll definitely take a look at d3js.org since our current solution works on top of a geoserver which has performance issues when we try to load rather large polygons and working with it is a frustrating process overall. The learning curve for the current solutions we have was steep as well so I'm not too scared (yet haha). Thank you!

coolgeek 5y ago

I haven't had time to dig deeply in to this yet, but it looks very nice!

mookey 5y ago
Thank you! I appreciate it.