[mrgriscom]

Author here. To provide some context, my main impetus for creating this map was to facilitate my interest in topographic prominence [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topographic_prominence].

Prominence requires finding a mountain's "key saddle" -- the pass that connects the mountain to higher ground. This may be an unremarkable point hundreds of miles away, often with several candidates whose elevations differ by only a few meters. Oilslick was designed with the goal of helping locate these points and intuit their significance. The color banding helps visualize the saddle 'pinch points' with relative ease, and the high-contrast color ramp enables the necessary fine discernment in elevation values, even for points located far apart.

You can peruse my (very preliminary, mostly mothballed) prominence work here [http://mrgris.com:10011/summits/?max=2500]

What I didn't expect was that the end result would be so aesthetically pleasing, almost dazzling. I love how it brings out subtle geological features and big-picture structure and relationships between landforms that don't show through in traditional topographic maps.

I share some of the criticisms I've read here. The zig-zag points on the ramp where the brightness must double back create contrast 'dead zones' where it's hard to interpret what's going on. Sea level areas are very dark and the actual coastline is hard to discern. Partly this is from practical limitations of not using a coastline mask in addition to the raw elevation dataset -- I don't actually know whether a point is land or water. But nevertheless there is interesting detail in these coastal areas that oilslick currently doesn't do justice to.

Overall it's been great to read the reactions here and see some people's perception of our world getting warped for the better.

[MrYellowP]

Excuse me, but could you add the ability to show the data as greyscale height values?

Anyone looking for good 2D terrains, like myself, would appreciate that. No need for saving functionality or anything, I can just make a screenshot.

It's actually not trivial getting elevation data, especially clean, undistorted data. At least I haven't really found a good way of getting any.

Btw, I really like oilslick. It's definitely the prettiest eye-cancer I've ever seen.

edit: well, i can work with converting the oilslick into monochrome, but i'm not convinced it looks right.

I'd have another request. The ability to remove, or at least slide, the bar on the left. The one containing all the text.

Hey, asking can't hurt! I'm not going to be mad if you say no. :D

[some_chap]

Thanks for making it available - I hope it doesn't burn through hosting costs!

Purely for interest, but for me, the really interesting part was flipping between the OilSlick and Terrain maps, picking out the way that the landscape dedicated the roads, etc, which while visible, doesn't stand out in the same way on conventional maps. As such, if you do any enhancements to the mapping, I'd request the ability to overlay road/rail/major towns over the OilSlick map, but obviously that's without the least idea of what that might actually entail!

[pontifier]

I really like it. My only feedback would be that some areas of interest are far from the steep contrast points.

Allowing someone to rotate the coloring and spacing while zoomed in might allow more insight into specific regions of interest. A slow animation descending the zero color at maybe 1m/s might be mesmerizing, as you watch the colors move like they were flowing down hill.

[zeristor]

Looking at the river Danube I hadn't appreciated how tight a valley it passes through to pass to the Black Sea.

Is there enough data to take this below sea level a bit further?, continental shelves, I guess the resolution for that is a lot lower, or patchy