Adding fictional street name data for a game

Hi all,

I’m building an alternate reality game where users need to look around a map of a real location but with some altered street names (mostly for legal reasons).

My goal is to build a real map UI like OSM or Google Maps, but with our fictional streetnames replacing some real ones.

I obviously don’t want to corrupt OSM’s data and add made-up stuff – but is there a way I can edit the relevant tiles for my purposes and export them somehow for use in a custom map? I want to keep the illusion of these places being real, but don’t want to break OSM’s data!

any tips gratefully received,
matt

Tiles, no - data, yes. Openstreetmap data is downloadable from http://planet.osm.org/ (you’ll probably want one of the extracts linked from the top-right of that page - initially for testing I’d use a small area local to you).

As a bit of an explainer to what’s in that big XML file you might want to have a look at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Elements .

You’ll need to be aware that one street in the real world might have more than one element - one part might have a sidewalk on both sides, the other not - so you’ll need to figure out some “renaming rules” that work at your end. Then you’ll need to figure out how to get the “game data” to people (perhaps you would want to generate map tiles, perhaps some other method).

Have you seen http://opengeofiction.net/ ?

@muralito, OpenGeoFiction is an entirely fictional world. I don’t believe that they allow imports with e.g. name changes from OSM.