Question about "simplification" of map to hex grid

[exsonic01]

This is south of Pyongyang, a field with 2 highways to approach to the NK capital city. Map will be 25km west-east, 30km north-south. I just finished streams, highway and major roads. Now I will do lines for minor roads, and polygons for city blocks, lakes, forests, and etc.

During the work, I found that "digitizing" the roads is not that simple. As far as I know, rivers and streams follows the edge of hex grids, but roads should "cross" the edge of hex, instead of following the edge of hex. Is this correcet?

For example

You could see, the roads from OpenStreetMap and the lines that I followed are not exactly match. Because some of the roads are too frequently crossing the hex edge or too complex, I simplified them to fit in the hex grid naturally. (Road condition of North Korea is not that great, even compared to 1980s Germany) For several places, this simplification make error of the position of road or crossroad more than 500m. Is this amount of error fine during simplification or digitization?

ps) This video shows how to edit wrong lines and polygons from QGIS.
https://youtu.be/Ai3k7nLfkE8

[harry_vdk]

There is no good or bad, its important to use the same style on a consistent way.

For example:
1 google map and 2 game maps.

A stream separate 2 hexes and a road connect 2 hexes.

[WildCatNL]

Hi Exsonic01,

digitizing isn't always straightforward. Especially with complex roads running up steep hills, or near major rivers (which, when > 20m wide, are stretched to 500m hexes, and shift nearby roads and rail roads).

Your rivers look okish, but could be fitting the hex corners tighter - something FCSS is going to require. The trick for streams is to enable QGis's snapping so it snaps the points to the hex corner grid as follows:
- choose menu "Settings", "Snapping Options"
- use snapping mode "Advanced"
- scroll until you see your hex grid layer, and select it for snapping to
- change tolerance to 25.0, units to pixels
And press Apply, OK.

I'm using snapping for streams, and for drawing fields and forests. I disable snapping when drawing, for example, roads.

Roads should not run along hex sides, but instead cross them, preferably near the center.

As Harry indicates, there's no best approach to digitizing, and it involves some "art".
What counts is that you capture the terrain that is essential for the battles you envision.

William

[exsonic01]

@Harry // Indeed, sometimes it is not easy to be consistent... I think it needs some experience.

@William // Oh wow, thank you so much for the snapping hint. I need to rework my stream :{ But oh well, it will be much better.