How well do you know your geography? I really suck at it, but I'm getting better by playing these two web browser games:

These SVG games work in modern browsers like Opera 9+ and Firefox 1.5+ and were written by orinoco and published on his Opera blog. I gave him some pointers to get them working in IE+ASV (I updated my guide with these tips too).

He really did some fantastic work - he started with a blank world map on WikiMedia Commons drawn in Inkscape which had all geography stuffed into a single path element and then he broke them out so that each country was its own path, then manually identified them all! It's not an easy task, but it was made easier because the graphics format was an open, well-documented standard in plain text. I hope he continues to experiment with SVG.

Can someone test them in Konqueror and Safari nightlies?


§331 · January 19, 2007 · Games, Opera, Software, SVG, Technology, Web · · [Print]

4 Comments to “SVG Map Games”

  1. Mike O. says:

    I’m using a WebKit nightly and both games work as far as I can see. I was playing the “name the state” game and while it didn’t freeze, the state that I was supposed to find was not selectable, every other one was though. Rather than knowingly commit an error, I just closed the game.

  2. Both games work fine in the latest WebKit nightly.

  3. Orinoco says:

    Hi Jeff, useful pointers indeed. Both games are now IE+ASV compatible.

    Yes, I certainly will be continuing with SVG!

    Thanks for all your help.

  4. DRead says:

    This is really impressive work.

    Might be nice to correct the following bugs: Newfoundland and Hainan Island are not countries, they are part of Canada and the PRC (China) respectively.