Hacker News Reader

Comment by anVlad11 | Hacker News Reader

I've been always fascinated by subway maps. The best ones are usually made manually and require update from contractors on every infrastructure extension. Were there any efforts to make autogenerated styled subway maps? Not like stylization of OSM data, but real schemes that show the whole system without sensory overload?

View on HN

Some examples of automatic layout in this style:

- M. Nöllenburg: Automated Drawings of Metro Maps, 2005. We've used that a while ago to render a few pretty images with our graph visualization library, but runtime is prohibitive (along with the requirement of a fast ILP solver).

- LOOM: https://github.com/ad-freiburg/loom and https://loom.cs.uni-freiburg.de/global

Wow, cool. Thanks for sharing!

I hope someone builds a web version of Mini Metro with this on top of OSM.

Side note: Mini Metro is an incredible game, and the studio is still updating it with new content a decade after release! I highly recomend everyone here checking it out if they haven't already.

(Not affiliated, just a fan)

An example of Tokyo can be found here:

https://loom.cs.uni-freiburg.de/global#subway-lightrail/octi...

Schematization took around 2 minutes according to the statistics, it really doesn't look that bad.

Sorry if I wasn't clear. Mini Metro is a game that has the player connecting metro stations together by routing them however they see fit. It's a minimalist network/graph game that's both relaxing and challenging. It uses loose approximations/abstractions of real world cities.https://dinopoloclub.com/games/mini-metro/ (highly recommended!)

I'd love to see a web map version of it based on real geography.

>We've used that a while ago to render a few pretty images with our graph visualization library, but runtime is prohibitive

I wonder if anyone's tried running it with the Tokyo transit system.

At least the subways seem not that bad:

https://www.yworks.com/assets/images/blog/tokyo.1e410d12c2.s...

There are more here in the article (clicking an image opens a slideshow): https://www.yworks.com/blog/automatic-metro-map-generation

>At least the subways seem not that bad:

That's only a very small fraction of the transit system in the Tokyo metro area. There's over 800 stations, and over 100 train lines.

I know of https://blog.transitapp.com/how-we-built-the-worlds-pretties... because it was on hn

Not that you asked, but here's a great video about the history of this style of map: https://youtu.be/cTLCfl01zuE

Reply on news.ycombinator.com