Supported
About This File
This is a LARGE region map and config (although the actual scale is just a guess) which represents a portion of the Martian terrain on the east side of the Argyre Planitia topological feature. I picked it for no reason other than that it seemed to have a nice variety of crater sizes all packed into a close space with what resembled a river.
EDIT- Added 2-Aug-2007: This map has been superceded in terms of accuracy by version 2, which I have listed separately. If this is a problem with the mods, I'll happily take it down - I simply thought the terrain in this version is interesting in its own right, because it has a more rugged topography. It should not, however, be confused with the actual martian topography. The other version takes care of that.
[Old description contd.:]This is a product of two days trying to figure out a procedure to extract a useful grayscale heightmap from the color coded shaded terrain images of the surface of mars. I managed to eliminate most of the extraeneous shadows and highlights, although there are still a few problems with hills "leaning" to the northwest. I don't think the problems that remain are significant, and you can use in-game terraforming tools to smooth things out a bit for city development - I like to think that it would be necessary to do so in the event that we were to colonize mars, anyhow.
Just make a new region, paste the config into the region folder under My Documents\SimCity 4\, and then hit Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R at the ingame region screen to render the heightmap. Just point it to argyre_planitia.jpg and all should be well. Be warned! This map takes about 35 minutes to render on my P4 2.6GHz / 1024MB of SDRAM. This is because in game it takes up a 24x24 kilometer area, or 15x15 miles. The mosaic of the region that I made took 12 different photographs to assemble. Apologies that there is a small sign of civilization in the screen shot, I didn't have photos of the completely pristine landscape. It kind of gives you a sense of the scale, though, as the town appears pretty small in comparison to the craters.
I hope you enjoy this, I just felt like sharing because it's the only thing I can really contribute, and I think this type of community is great.
