Semi-esoteric technical question

[MidwestSimGeek 0]

Pardon the strange question, but here goes... Has anyone in here managed to reverse-engineer a saved city file to see how the data is stored?  I'm wondering whether it's possible, for someone with a hex editor and a lot of time on his hands, to isolate the part of the file which contains a city's road and transportation network.

I ask this because I recently got my hands on a very accurate Minneapolis-St. Paul terrain and started laying out roads to match their real-world equivalents.  I chose one major north-south road and one major east-west road whose placement could be determined from certain terrain features, laid those out, and proceeded to base all the others on 100 tiles = 1 mile (since, according to the literature, 1 tile equals almost exactly 52.8 feet.)  Unfortunately, after about 16 hours of work, I realized that when the region rendered, its aspect ratio had somehow gotten thrown off!  Looking from east to west, it was accurate, but it was severely compressed along its north-south axis, meaning all my work had basically been for naught.

I was hoping I could extract the road placement information from the old city files, correct the bitmap and re-render the region, then plug the old road information into the new city files.  I realize it's a long shot, but I thought it was worth asking after all that work I lost!

[jabezscratch 161]

Wow, I'm not sure that I know exactly what you're suggesting but, to my knowledge, that is not possible -- at least not according to any known method of which I am aware. Plug old road info into new city files? Based on my relatively limited knowledge I just don't think that's possible. All the power to you if you can make it work though -- good luck!