Caruvia

Caruvia
A work by Reginald Routhwick
Type	Topographic map
Topics	Countries, Caribbean, Mapmaking, QGIS
Setting(s)	Caruvia, Jamaica, Caribbean Sea
In development since	April 2016

Caruvia is a map project by Reginald Routhwick.

Development

Caruvia, whose name is derived from the French carreau ("square"), stems from two separate precursors: Vigesima and Novissima.

Vigesima

In October 2015, Routhwick—at the time a resident of Waterbury, Connecticut—began developing Vigesima in October 2015 after having issues with his borrowed desktop system due to undesired malware. Vigesima—a variation of the word "vigesimal", itself derived from Latin—was a British Overseas Territory set several hundred miles south of Jamaica in the Greater Antilles. The definition of "vigesimal", "related to the number 20", was the source of several gimmicks therein:

• The map area measured 20 × 20 km (400 km²).
• There were 20 rivers, from which the territory's townlands received their names. All of them were foreign or English terms for the number 20.
• The capital, Scoresby, was located on the southern coast.
• The highest point was exactly 400 m (20 × 20 m; 1,312.336 ft) in height.

Vigesima was crafted on QGIS via a more primitive method than later endeavours of Routhwick's, all while the system was in Safe Mode. The coastline, and all of the contours, were drawn by hand back then; Routhwick later discovered that a combination of r.surf.fractal (a GRASS GIS function shipped with QGIS) and J. Slayton's Wilbur program handled terrain generation far more quickly.

Novissima

The following April, as system troubles were mounting up, Routhwick tabled Vigesima to make way for a downsized replacement inheriting the procedure of its precursor: Novissima, whose name was actually a variant of the Latin novissimus ("newest"; "youngest"), but was more influenced by various Indo-European words for "nine" (among them Spanish nueve). True to the latter conceit, the map area now measured 9 km² (3 × 3 km). As with Vigesima, it was still south of Jamaica, whose government controlled it as an unincorporated outpost. WIP screenshots of both projects were occasionally posted on Google+.

The borrowed system's hard drive failed in May 2016, thus halting progress on both Vigesima and Novissima altogether.

In late 2018, after settling in Florida, Routhwick revived Novissima on a just-received spare replacement laptop, and posted backstory lore and related tidbits on G+. After a slew of difficulties ensued, he abandoned the map in favour of reviving his gift-map project, which took on the name of Veritas in early 2019 (after carto-enthusiast Vicky, a G+ regular who abruptly left before he could show her some samples).

Novissima's next retool occurred from August to October 2019, well after G+ closed and Routhwick moved to Steemit. Although this attempt progressed much further than earlier ones, Routhwick also discarded it once The Sevton Saga's Rogatia, and another shot at Veritas, took up his attention.

Rebranding

On April 29, 2023, Routhwick announced the merger of both Veritas and Novissima into the brand-new Caruvia in an edition of his "FTA" (From the Author) feature. The ensuing rework was launched on May 4, using QGIS 3.30/'s-Hertogenbosch and Wilbur.