To latest comment

Avoiding duplicate locations on small polygon maps

Hi. I made a polygon map of Hinckley town centre
https://www.geoguessr.com/maps/612b460924ec9b0001436c04

1. Why does it say the map has 24 locations? My estimate is that the polygon contains 10 times as many: 40 photospheres plus 200 streetview points.

 2. When I played a game on the map, two of the locations were identical. Why do you allow this to happen? I would've thought that it would be relatively easy for you to stop this happening. Thanks
Dadge City

Comments

  • I next made a polygon map of Redditch town centre. https://www.geoguessr.com/maps/613dc316d079b100012ebc16 Again, it says there are only 13 locations, when the polygon really includes 10x that many. And when I played a game on the map, THREE of the rounds were the same location!

    Dadge City
  • The polygon doesn't actually select all locations but only picks locations from a database. Why? Simply because there is absolutely no way to get all locations within an area with the Google Maps API. Google doesn't offer any tool for this. And trying to select all the locations every time someone plays the map is too resource-consuming.

    So what GeoGuessr did is to populate a huge database of locations by brute-forcing random spots all over the world and saving every location they could get (this was obviously done using an automated program). The problem is that it takes too much time to find all locations so they only got a sample of it, and in your case they only could get Redditch 13 times (and that's already a good amount, some towns have nothing). The whole database for the world has around 16 millions locations.

    The only way for you to have more locations is to make a hand-picked map instead and click everywhere in the town. This is how many maps are made anyways since Google is too lazy to provide us decent tools.
    Mapper
  • Thanks for this explanation. As you say, I'll have to go the more time-consuming route in future. It's still not clear to me though why GG delivers repeat locations in the same game - why doesn't GG reject repeat locations?
    Dadge City

Add your comment or create a new post

Your name and post can be seen by everyone.Your e-mail will never be shown publicly.

Support forum from
About cookies