The Naming of Places (Part 8): The Sea

Next up on place names are oceans (or seas).  Currently there can only be one ocean name on the map, and it's hard-coded to be “Chrysalis Sea":

That name was borrowed from one of my reference maps.

The real world isn't much help in naming oceans or seas.  There are only 5 oceans in the world, and only a hundred or so “seas," many of which are actually bays, gulfs and the like.  The thesaurus isn't any help, either.  There are only two synonyms in English for large bodies of water -- “ocean" and “sea."  Even the historical thesaurus doesn't offer any additional vocabulary.  So it looks like I'm on my own.

To start with, I think weather qualities work for ocean names (“The Stormy Ocean"), water qualities (“The Glassy Ocean"), colors (“The Azure Ocean"), directional adjectives (“The Western Ocean"), climate adjectives (“The Steamy Ocean" / “The Frigid Ocean").  On these fantasy maps, the ocean is a place of mystery -- it's the edge of the known world -- so a lot of the mystery adjectives I used for the Lost Coast work here as well (“The Bloodstained Ocean").  Marine animals and seabirds should work too (“Amberjack Ocean" / “Albatross Ocean").  Some miscellaneous adjectives work as well.

Note that the ocean is usually singular on the maps, or at least distinguished, so using “The" with the name seems to work well.  I can also use the “Ocean of ..." form as well.

I went through all my reference maps and collected the ocean names to see how well it matched what I done so far (and to gather new ideas as well):

The Summer Sea
Eastern Sea
Western Sea
Southern Ocean (x4)
Endless Ocean
Eternal Sea
Vast Sea
Trackless Sea
The Great Sea
Black Sea
Silver Sea
Sea of Mist
Frozen Sea
White Sea
Twoways Sea
Ocean of Despair
Salt Sea
Sea of Glass
Sea of Narcissus
Dreamer Sea
Inner Sea
Twilight Ocean
Sea of Frost Ridge
The Jade Sea
The Silent Sea
Sea of Whispers
Chrysalis Sea
Sea of the Great Deep
Sea of Fangs

I'm surprised at how many of these I can already generate.  Here's a list of names generated using the ideas above:

Cormorant Sea
The Eerie Sea
Squid Ocean
The Peridot Sea
Codfish Sea
The Vermilion Sea
Hatchetfish Ocean
The Torrent Ocean
Jaeger Ocean
Sea of Maelstroms
The Icy Ocean
Razorbill Sea
The Dark Ocean
Sea of Cannibals
Oyster Ocean
The Ravaged Sea
Drum Sea
The Unlit Sea

This list seems a little heavy on sea creatures, but overall it seems a good selection. Unlike some of the other place names, I'm not generating any ocean names based upon invented words, but that's something I could easily add if I feel the need.

Generating the directional and temperature-related adjectives is a little challenging.  For something like a point or a bay, there's a pretty-well defined and small area, and the label is going to be close to that area.  But an ocean can stretch across much of the map, and so it's hard to pick a particular spot to serve as the reference point for temperature and direction.  In fact, I really want the temperature and direction to be based on where the label ends up.  So if I have (say) an ocean that stretches all the way from the bottom of the map to the top of the map along the left edge, I can call it the “Frigid Ocean" if I put the label up near the top, and the “Southern Ocean" if I put the label near the bottom.  But I pick the name before I place the label, so there's a bit of a problem here.

One workaround is to use the anchor point I select for the label as the reference point.  The label isn't tied very strongly to this point, but perhaps it will work for temperature and direction.

It isn't obvious, but this is a cold map (you can see some pine trees mixed into the forest), so “The Iceberg Sea" makes sense here.

When I implemented ocean labels I only created the one style shown above -- and angled, slightly curved label.  Since I'm working on ocean labels, I decided to add a couple of other styles.  First, a multi-line label:

And a single-line, horizontal label:

I don't much like this style.  One thing that might improve it is to let the label fall at an angle; that's something I've wanted to look into for some time, so I'll take this opportunity to implement it.

The basic implementation is to provide a range of allowed angles for each label, and let the label placing routine vary the angle along with the position as it is trying to find a good spot for the label.  (None of the evaluation code needs to change, because the criteria for a good placement hasn't changed.)  Generally speaking I will limit straight labels of this sort to the angle range of -45 degrees to 45 degrees.  Anything outside that range becomes hard to read, looks awkward, or is upside down on the map.

With that fix in place, I get this:

The red box here shows the original label placement (basically the same as the final label placement above) and the green dot marks the “center of the ocean" that is an anchor for this label.  The program has found an angle that allows it to slide the label up between the two islands to get the label closer to the anchor.

If I relax the pull towards the anchor point, this happens:

With less pull from the anchor, the label swings the other way and slides below the middle islands.  This is a better placement in some aspects (further away from other labels primarily).  

If I force a sea illustration onto the map, the ocean label will try to create some separation from the illustration, and this happens:

Now the label has swung back up between the islands, but pushed over a bit to stay away from the illustration.

The placement of the anchor point in this example actually isn't very good; it's near the center of the ocean, but too near islands in the ocean.  It would be better to find an anchor point that tries to stay away from land.  Also, it's nice for this anchor point to be close to an edge of the map that is largely ocean, so that the label indicates the greater mystery beyond the edge of the map.

At this point I realized that these are variants of a general case label that can move around, tilt, and have an arc to it.  And while I could always force a particular style by locking down any of those variables, I ought to just write the generalized label that would let the label placement algorithm change the location, angle and arc to try to find the best fit.  

(The exception here is the multi-line label.  SVG doesn't natively support multi-line text, so doing anything beyond stacking up a bunch of centered single-line labels quickly becomes very complicated.  In this case, I don't think multi-line labels work very well for oceans at any rate.)

Much hacking between that last paragraph and this one, but I have the general case working:

In this case, you can see the original label (the olive green outline) was arced upwards and fell partly off the map because the green anchor point is close to the edge of the map.  The final solution is arced downward and moved left and upwards so that it can both fit on the map and still be close to the anchor point (the bright green dot).

If I relax the requirement to stay near the anchor point it moves up and keeps the upward arc:

With that I'll declare victory on ocean labels.