World Map of Players

The map below presents the locations of players who have been online recently, and whose locations were guessed from their IP addresses. Here is how it works:

• The core service for the map is to match IP addresses with geographic locations. The NetWorldMap project is collecting the data and making some nifty services, based on that data, available for free. Among the free services is an API webmasters can use to ask for latitude and longitude associated with a particular IP address.
  
  
• When a player logs in, the login process asks NetWorldMap to guess his location, and if it is known with reasonable certainty, updates the database with "last known" location for the player. The latitude and longitude are also passed into the game lobby, which can display a realtime map of the locations of the players currently connected. If you would like to see the realtime map, log into the game as a guest.
  
  
• The Map viewer is a small Java application, which interrogates the player database to get the last known locations of all players who have played recently. The java applet digests the raw data and draws circles on the map, based on number of players near a given location. Obviously, this on-demand process is only satisfactory if the amount of data involved is fairly small.