Can You Spot the New Additions? - Spring 2023 Patch & Update

We're finally done with patching and updating the main political and chorographical map, as well as all the connected backend datasets! Attached to this post is the comprehensive Patch log. Over 20 new states have been added to the map this time around, and there are also half a dozen state name changes.

You can already download the print-ready political and chorographical maps (same links as before) if you have access to them on Patreon, or view the maps on the website or on Deviantart.

We've also finished patching maps like the time zone map and the religion map, and are slowly working our way to going back and patching the other affected feature maps. By the end of the week, the links here for all those maps should direct you to downloading the most updated versions.

This patch is a lot more comprehensive than previous patches thanks also in part to the many contributions made by fellow travellers of the Atlas Altera Discord server, who pooled together their time and eyes to amass a list of suggested fixes: so a big thank you to all those who contributed in this effort!

GIS COMPATIBILITY

Some more good news is that we now have GIS compatibility for the project thanks to the generous time and effort made by a contributor to the project, Phen!

Phen helped port the vector-based Altera map into QGIS and generated a GEOJSON file with it. With that, I was able to polish the file using QGIS myself (and with the guidance of Tristan), and now we have a public-facing file, embedded with the latest Factbook data, which anyone can download and explore. You can download the GEOJSON file here.

Apart from uploading the file onto Geojson.io yourself and playing around with the Altera map overlaid on the real world, two interesting developments have come out of the new GIS compatibility.

The first one is that Frank has used our new GEOJSON file to generate a new template for the interactive Altera Factmap. It's still early stage/a work-in-progress, but it's nevertheless an exciting development to share. Play around with the globe here. 

The second one is that one of our Discord fellow traveller's has brought the file onto Flourish to create a parallel interactive map for interfacing with the data I've made available in the GEOJSON file. If you're curious about population numbers, territorial sizes, capital cities etc. etc., click around this map to see for yourself!