> I've always wanted to try a bottom-anchored design, so I took my chance.
I know exactly what you mean!
201–210 of 262 posts
> I've always wanted to try a bottom-anchored design, so I took my chance.
I know exactly what you mean!
Scoring is super harsh for the UK where we don't have a grid system and a million small streets.
Not sure the selected area is suitable for a city like London - there are just too many small streets in every directions to be able to know them all, or even half of them. It's possibly more suitable in US cities for example that are divided into large blocks and large roads.
Thanks. I'm considering adding an option to change the radius and or difficulty modes which filter out streets by length.
Having difficulty settings like
* tourist
main streets / squares, maybe some (renowned - although that might take some additional Wikipedia/Wikidata data sources :-))
landmarks if those can easily enough be extracted from OSM data
easter egg mode for s/Paris/your favourite City with underground transportation/: find a specific metro station :-) (any entrance would count)
* resident "tourist" + smaller streets + any street really close to the circle center (15 minutes by foot / 5 minutes by car
-- oh, you'll just have to add flooding algorithm :-) ^^)
* pedestrian "resident" + smaller streets everywhere but with greater probability closer to the circle center + footpaths
(although with them probably lacking proper names most of the time that could be hard - but you could include
e.g. streets from pedestrian zones)
* taxi driver everything ^^
would be great :-)And then there could be (best optional) penalty modes, too:
* "resident"+:
if you pin a street that is more or less orthogonal to the target street
(say their mean directions intersect at more than 45 degrees ; and the pin is sufficiently
far away (30m / 10% of map height / half a block?) from their intersection (if any exists)
to rule out precision errors) you get only 1/2 the points
* "resident": if you pin a street the wrong direction off a main street (and the target street
does not cross the main street) you get only 2/3 the points
(i.e. main streets intersecting the plane and you picked the wrong "half")
"tourist":
the same but for cities with rivers where you picked the wrong bank
I also found the circle a bit big for my taste/confidence and cheated a bit by not placing the circle center at my location but so that I would still get my neighborhood but more of the outskirts than the city center...I also got very lucky with the streets, so got 330/500 on my first try. One was certainly also due to a square that is also used (at some specific times) for car traffic.
As an interesting effect, I got the first street wrong by some meters (and orientation :-\) and the 5th street was the same street again. At first I was a bit puzzled, and then got full marks for that one :-) I saw that you got the report of repeating streets already in some other comment already but that experience led me to another idea:
It would be a great learning aid to (optionally) go through the (widely?) missed streets again after the 5 rounds.
And if we could even re-claim some (small) amount of points for getting them right the second time that would certainly help our brains etch in the correct position even more :-)
A small aside: I found it pleasantly devious that the circle restricts the scrolling at higher zoom levels! Just in the cases where the target street is very close to the border it might be nice to relax it a bit though...
And while trying it out on Desktop I discovered a possible bug:
While choosing the location, when pressing the "Zoom In" button 2-4 times suddenly street names were displayed again! Is this intentional so people can easier find their starting point? Firefox 98.0 on Linux
My last point:
Would it be possible to export a map view to print it out in good quality for offline reconnaissance / tinkering?
I did have some trouble understanding how it's calculating distance and drawing the dashed line. It does not always draw the shortest distance from the pin to the polyline for the road. I tried a few rounds with some deliberately wrong guesses and I'm still not sure I know what it's doing. Some examples:
(1) A road that runs from southwest to northeast. I placed the pin to the southeast of the road. Eyeballing it, the shortest distance is roughly northeast. The dashed line was drawn 10-15 degrees east of north. If it's significant, it drew to an intersection (not the nearest, but reasonably close).
(2) A road that runs east-west. I placed the pin north of the road by 50-60 meters. The dashed line was drawn 15-30 degrees west of south. It did not draw to an intersection or other point of interest. It may be drawing a ray from the center of the circle of interest.
(3) A road that runs north-south. I placed the pin east of the road by 40-ish meters, near the north edge of the circle. The dashed line was drawn 15-30 degrees west of south (my guess in #2 about a ray from the center was wrong), to an intersection, giving a 102 meter distance.
(4) A discontinuous street. (Replicated for a different street! 4th St and 5th St in Marion, IA, if it helps.) The street runs north-south but has a quarter-ish-mile gap. I placed the pin not far from the southern section of the street. The dashed line was drawn from the pin, past (and nearly parallel to) the southern section, then connected to the southern tip of the northern section. Interestingly enough, the distance looked like it was pin-to-southern-section.
(5) A north-south road in rural Iowa taking advantage of the 1-mile grid. I placed the pin near the center of the circle, slightly less than one mile from the nearest point of the road. It drew the dashed line northwest and showed a distance of 2002 meters. I would have expected due west, and ~1500 meters.
(6) A road that runs north-south (with a bit of southeast a half mile south of the circle), that happened to just barely peek inside the circle on the far west. I placed the pin near the outer edge of the circle, roughly northwest. It drew the dashed line nearly due south (several miles!) but reported a distance of 281 meters.
Sometimes the distances seem reasonable even if the dashed line is drawn to a different point on the road. Sometimes the distances and the dashed lines both seem to be off. Intersections seem to have something to do with it, but there also seems to be something else going on too.
For testing, if you're interested, the intersection of "White Road" and "North Alburnett Road" in Iowa (between Marion and Alburnett) is great. It's sparse, gives you nice straight roads, with just a few driveways and other points-on-polyline to confuse(?) algorithms. If you get C Ave Extension just barely in the circle on the west, that's #6.
And for what it's worth, I had fun trying to figure this out!
Hi HN, I made Back Of Your Hand, a map-based game where you're given random street names and you have to locate them on the map. You can play solo or compete with friends on other devices. I made it for my dad as a Christmas present. It also gave me an opportunity to learn about geocoding, etc. Tech: serverless, Leaflet, Turf, Svelte, TypeScript, Cloudflare pages. I tried to use as many open / free tools as I could.…
Nice work! > I've always wanted to try a bottom-anchored design, so I took my chance. I know exactly what you mean!
Hi HN, I made Back Of Your Hand, a map-based game where you're given random street names and you have to locate them on the map. You can play solo or compete with friends on other devices. I made it for my dad as a Christmas present. It also gave me an opportunity to learn about geocoding, etc. Tech: serverless, Leaflet, Turf, Svelte, TypeScript, Cloudflare pages. I tried to use as many open / free tools as I could.…
this is an awesome idea! only bit of feedback I have is that the street names may need some cleanup / filtering of some kind. I picked a starting location in downtown Seattle (47.60882,-122.33087) and was told to locate "escalator"...it seems to have picked the escalator to the Pioneer Square light rail station as a "street" to be located.
Great game! The one "unfair" question I got was "Treppe Tiefgarage" which means "Stairs to the underground parking garage". Difficult to figure out how to filter these out in the general case.
Great game! The one "unfair" question I got was "Treppe Tiefgarage" which means "Stairs to the underground parking garage". Difficult to figure out how to filter these out in the general case.
I got "tunnel entrance street". There were two tunnels this might have referred to. I picked the one on the wrong side of town.
Great game! The one "unfair" question I got was "Treppe Tiefgarage" which means "Stairs to the underground parking garage". Difficult to figure out how to filter these out in the general case.
Similarly, I got a "Zugang Steig B" (Entranceway B). Maybe adding a button to skip the question: "not really a street".