Hello fellow adventurers!
Today I bring forth to you a number of updates that make the usability of the map significantly easier as well as add a few visual improvements.
The most obvious enhancement: 3d-terrain! Yeah, enjoy the stunning vista of Mt Fuji towering over the surrounding. Or take a look at the Jigokudani Monkey Park to see it hidden within a mountainous valley. You can also now see directly from the map why Geibikei Gorge is so damn mystical.
Anyways, another improvement is now that the map supports direct links to your favourite places! Moving the map now updates the position of the browser’s url automatically, meaning you can copy and paste the map and a friend or follow of yours will open the map exactly at the point where you left off! Pretty neat feature huh? The links given above also represent this feature, so click away and get directly to the aforementioned places!
The final improvement to the front-end is a feature is one that I don’t want to advertise too much because I want to do some more testing on it. It is in fact 3d-buildings! Yes! The map can now show you the different heights of the buildings included on the map, as long as you select the “Streets” map style. It is a bit of a performance hog, which is why it is only available on the Streets Mode (Perhaps I could rename it into Buildings Mode for now?).
There are of course also improvements behind the scene, such as some usage data collection that will be used to fix bad locations automatically in the future. Another is multi-lingual support. German YouTuber Aprikosen Klang contacted me expressing her wish to be featured on the map. I promptly re-architectured some of my tools to enable German (as well as a handful of other languages) to work for the map. A problem that will arise from this are German versions of places (such as München instead of Munich) but that is a problem that a future version of myself is able to tackle instead.
Overall, I hope you enjoy the plethora of newly-added features and continue exploring the AI-powered Project Odyssey! Version 1.2 is also rapidly approaching with an absolutely killer feature in tow that should really help you on planning travels to Japan.
And with this I say,
Sayonara bitches!