Building charts

There's a great writeup about the practicalities involved in building an accurate (sort of)  world wide navigational chart over on the Steam Community. It's about the charts in SailAway.

Picture from the process

If you dunno what SailAway is, the do yourself a favour and google it. It's truly amazing. Anyway, the creator of SailAway explains the tech stuff so even humans can understand; Perhaps except for the json-stuff, but I'll add a few words here.

Way back in time, they stored data in a way that took up as little space as possible. On top of that it was fast to read, write and computer those data. Then someone invented XML, and the need for harddrive space and CPU power exploded, because XML makes data grow by a factor of ten - plus it takes loads of CPU to decode and transform into computable data. These days it seems JSON is taking over. Not much is different. If they store the oceans of the world in JSON then no wonder it's a huge database.

Read the whole thing here!

SailAway is a huge and fabulous project. I can't really decide if I like it better than SL; But they  don't really compare. SL sailing is so much more than SailAway, and yet in some ways it is so much less. Strawberry or vanilla?  Hmm...