Why this map shows Florida

Open ViceScreen today and you get a dark, stylised map of Florida: the peninsula, the Keys, Lake Okeechobee, the interstates. Not Leonida. People ask why, and the answer is worth writing down.

The official map does not exist yet

Rockstar has not published a map of Leonida. What exists publicly is a set of place names from trailers — Vice City, Leonida Keys, Grassrivers, Port Gellhorn, Ambrosia, Mount Kalaga National Park — and a lot of reconstructions made by fans.

Those reconstructions are impressive work. They are also built from trailer frames and from material that leaked in 2022 after a break-in. We are not going to host a copy of that and charge money for access to it.

Invented places are the protected ones

There is a neat inversion here that is easy to get backwards. Florida’s coastline is a fact about the world. Nobody owns the shape of a real shoreline, which is why anyone can print a map of it. Leonida’s coastline is a drawing somebody made — so it is protected precisely because it is invented.

The more faithful a fan reconstruction is to the real Leonida, the more clearly it is a copy of somebody’s creative work. Accuracy makes the problem worse, not better.

The practical reason

Set the law aside for a second. Building our core asset on someone else’s server means it can disappear, change, or start blocking us, on a day we do not choose. For the single most important thing in the product, that is not a trade worth making.

What we did instead

The current map is rendered from Natural Earth, a public domain dataset. No attribution required, no share-alike clause — which also ruled out OpenStreetMap, whose licence would have complicated a commercial product. We render it in Web Mercator, so the tiles line up with real coordinates, and in our own palette so it does not look like a borrowed basemap.

The whole pyramid is 1,041 tiles and about a megabyte. The generator is a single script in the repository; change three colour constants and the whole map re-renders.

And after launch

On 19 November the game ships and people start playing. The map of Leonida that appears on ViceScreen will be the one our users build: locations they found, submitted, and voted on. That map is ours because they made it.

That is slower than copying one. It is also the only version worth having.