indeed, this is a completely new dimension. I have discovered this amazing project 2 days ago on the net.
A team of enthusiasts most carefully collecting information about cities/towns on earth, including precise lat-long coordinates, national naming, country, country code, ....and population since 1996!
The result is a monster data base of 50000 entries that appears very, very interesting!
41245 entries are specified with precise coordinates and number of inhabitants and can be directly exploited for Celestia.
The site URL is:
http://www.world-gazetteer.com/home.htm
© by Stefan Helders http://www.world-gazetteer.com
SH is from Germany and the data base is free. He just asks to include the above Copyright statement.
To extract & convert these 41245 cities/towns into Celestia format, just amounted to hacking together a Perl script for 15 mins and then, 1 sec later, the generated *.ssc file was ready for a first test; of course all, with varying importance weights, as calculated from the quoted information about inhabitants.
Otherwise, it would be impossible to handle 40k+ location labels;-).
Based on census data input the Gazetteer authors use a sophisticated theoretical 'growth' formula, to extrapolate the number of inhabitants to the current year. I checked many numbers explicitly and was surprised indeed about the achieved accuracy.
Finally, let me give you a flavour of this new dimension;-). Below is a thumbnail from where I live (you can virtually see my house;-)). You must click on it to appreciate the amazing agreement between the small town locations and the label positions based on my 32k (!!) Nightlights texture in 1600x1200 resolution!
The only "hair in the soup", as we say over here;-) is that Celestia does not support 8bit font display and unicode encoding. The 50000 names are in Latin1 = iso-8859-1 encoding. Unfortunately, so far, Celestia skips all letters that have diacritic signs, Umlaute, etc.....too bad, we got to work on that!
OK, her comes the image:
and in order to illustrate that this incredible precision also holds in remote corners of our globe, here is another image from the himalaya ( don't forget to click on the image!):
and another pe(a)rl chain of towns along the southern Andes. Virtually every light patch carries a label now!
Bye Fridger
(And I thought the CIA database was detailed...!)
I can't wait to see how much labeling there is around my hometown area (the Glens Falls, NY region).
