[OOC][Info]Nothing Better Than This Wiki, part II

[Bob Schroeck]

I spent a couple hours trying my hand at some fairly simple stuff with the mapping tools and all I succeeded at getting was a blue circle and frustrated. Every time I tried to mix different objects (circles, rectangles, points of interest), something refused to render, and in several cases I ended up with a map that had nothing on it but blue "ocean" background.

Based on the documentation, this tool isn't intended to let you draw fine(r) details on a map -- it's intended to highlight big areas on larger ones, such as nuclear bomb devastation zones on a city map or linking stops on a region-wide travel itinerary. There's not even an indication what units the parameters indicating size are in -- a circle of diameter 300 appears to be approximately 800-900 feet across, by my best visual reckoning. This suggests the units are probably meters or yards, but nowhere in the documentation does it actually say.

It's also pretty clear that the use of latitude and longitude to specify points for any of the functions is kind of a secondary option -- the docs make it clear that you're expected to use things like city names. This makes some of the more unfriendly functions make a bit more sense -- it's much easier to use the polygon function if you just have to list the names of three or more locations, rather than identify every set of lat/long coords you need.

Honestly, I'm growing to hate this thing.