Research Register
External datasets and scholarship used by project tools and design documentation.
The current world-map terrain uses Copernicus GLO-30 for land elevation, OpenStreetMap for real-world location anchors, and a generalized Dead Sea lakebed derived from published bathymetric findings. Fictional locations remain explicitly marked as authored approximations.
Journey terrain map
The interactive map covers 31.55–31.93° N and 35.17–35.58° E. The checked-in terrain.f32 asset is a 256 × 237 sample derivative of the Copernicus tile Copernicus_DSM_COG_10_N31_00_E035_00_DEM. It preserves the real terrain at roughly 160–180 metre display spacing while keeping the browser mesh practical.
Regenerate both portal and fallback assets with tools/build-journey-terrain.sh from the downloaded source GeoTIFF.
Copernicus GLO-30 is a digital surface model in WGS84 with one-arc-second grid spacing. The application carries the required adapted-data notice:
Produced using Copernicus WorldDEM-30 © DLR e.V. 2010–2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014–2018 provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; all rights reserved.
Sources:
Location anchors
Qumran, Jericho, the Mount of Temptation, Wadi Qelt, Jerusalem, and Mt. Moriah use OpenStreetMap place coordinates retrieved through Nominatim. These anchors locate the relevant real feature; they do not settle the exact footprint of an authored level or encounter.
The Dead Sea Egg and Lilitu’s Plateau have no real-world coordinates. Their map markers are current authored approximations near the northern basin and Qumran shoreline. Their final placements remain unresolved until the Act I traversal is blocked out.
Sources:
Drained Dead Sea treatment
Copernicus records the present water surface rather than submerged relief. The application replaces only pixels identified as the present Dead Sea surface with a generalized northern-basin model. It follows the large-scale findings in Neev and Hall’s 1974 survey: a broad, nearly flat northern floor, a deepest elevation near −730 metres relative to Mediterranean sea level, gentler western slopes, and steeper eastern slopes.
This reconstruction is suitable for world-layout exploration, not scientific measurement or final terrain production. A licensed bathymetric grid should replace it if one becomes available for production use.
Source:
- David Neev and John K. Hall, “Geophysical investigations in the Dead Sea”, Sedimentary Geology 23 (1979), 209–238.
Historical timeline
The timeline app separates Historical, Tradition, and Game Lore events. Dates associated with the origins of YHWH, the relationship between YHWH and El, and the emergence of exclusive monotheism are scholarly reconstructions with active debates; the interface uses ranges and qualifying language where no single date is defensible.
Primary research anchors are registered on the historical references page. The central scholarly works are Theodore J. Lewis’s The Origin and Character of God and Mark S. Smith’s The Origins of Biblical Monotheism. Museum and university sources anchor individual material events, inscriptions, monuments, and conventional chronologies.
The timeline’s future range is deliberately unseeded. Supplication, the Merkabah, and the campaign should receive dates only when those dates become design decisions.