How to avoid drawing dense maps?

Question

The problem I have in hand is like drawing Google Maps by myself, in particular, roads. When my map scale is huge, I face no problem, but when I zoom out there are too many things to draw -- sure, I can rank the elements, and for example draw only important roads (like highways), but at given scale there will be always some case, when the road has so many intersections and turns, and instead of nice drawing I will get ugly blob.

So I would like to simplify it, yet not in misleading way. I would like to avoid drawing dense map (part of it).

• is there official name of this problem/algorithm for it?
• if there is special case for maps?

And if there is nothing anything "official" -- how to tackle this problem?

Answer 1

You could smooth the path of the road by fitting a spline to it (or some other curve), with parameters chosen based on the zoom level to ensure that it follows a smooth path on the screen.