Mexico City Region

[harishna 847]

 G'Day! I'm trying to make a BIG BIG project: Mexico City. I looked for Maps over the the STEX, and found a couple, but I was not happy with them so I decided to make my own.

this is the resulting gray scale image

I tried to make it as realistic as possible, the result was a gigantic region compose of 254 Big cities, every big city representing over 4km, I think this should be correct. What I don't like is the height scale. Mexico city is located in a valley 2000m above sea level and surrounded by mountains and volcanoes, many above 4000m and a couple almost reaching 5000m, but the result after rendering the city doesn't convince me, the mountains slope seem to be to soft, the snow appears in the right places, but the mountains look too flat. Maybe they are right, but I'm not sure. Here is an image showing the change from the 2000 m to a pick above 4500 m:

 

Does this looks alright, and if not, is there a way to improve this or correct it?

Many thanks!!

[GMT 389]

hard to tell whats wrong from such a small part of the region.

load all city tiles with the map data and then post a new picture, makes it easier to see errors when you got the whole map to look at

[tungston 19]

You are going to need to use a height mod to get the elevations you mentioned, without one the highest elevation would be just over 500 meters.

RGB= 0: 252 meters (827 feet) below sea level

RGB= 84: Sea level

RGB= 255: 513 meters (1683 feet) above sea level

With the import.dat height mod.

    RGB=10 very deep water

    RGB=25 about sea level

    RGB=35 about one god mode level about sea level

[harishna 847]

You mean like MallowtheCloud or beskhu3epnm? I got them but I don't exactly how to use them, since the peaks reach close to 5000m should I use this or should I use the 2500m one as that is the change in slope from the valley to the top of the mountains? and when should I use it, while rendering or while opening cities???

Many Thanks!!!

[tungston 19]

Yes, import.dat is MallowtheCloud's, or at least he posted it for download.

The mod needs to be in the plugins folder when the region is rendered.  Try the import.dat, and plan for the elevation changes with the grayscale, you may need to experiment on a much smaller region to get the desired results.

[harishna 847]

After playing with the grayscale image and using the 3500m mod I'm finally happier with the results, something that also helped is removing the CP columbus Terrain from the plugin folder before rendering as it comes with its own import parameters. The only thing is that after rendering, only the highest peaks are above water, but this is nothing cannot be solve by raising the terrain...

I don't know it it would be good to post in the STEX....I think it is the most accurate map for the region I have seen, but it's quite big.....

Thanks for the help

[GMT 389]

you can try and manually set the water level parameters, but this requires to get used to work with ilives reader, which is not hard at all, but takes a few trys.

[harishna 847]

Thanks for all the comments. After opening a few cities I noticed something, it looks like height changes at low altitudes are more steep than at the higher peaks, I believe it should be the opposite, I was quite happy with the results at medium height altitudes, but when I started to open the highest areas they look rather flat, it is to my believe that these peaks should be more steep. I have attached two images to show this problem the first one shows medium size peaks, and the second show the highest peak in my region..please pay no attention to the different terrain mods.

 

[harishna 847]

I haven't made any changes to my region since my last update I just changed the terrain mod to PEGASUS MTP, the only thing is that I'm not getting any snow on mountain tops. Is there a way to change the elevation at which snow appear using this terrain mod?

[tungston 19]

You might need to try a different height mod to get the elevations right.

[harishna 847]

Do you have one in mind?

Thanks

[tungston 19]

Some have good luck with the "import.dat".

[harishna 847]

Well I decided to try importing the region using Terraformer and the results are much much better the elevations now seem to be correct with the steep changes occurring at higher altitudes, I used the import.dat for this and it seem to do the job t. The only thing is that there seem to be no erosion after the rendering process. To solve this problem I have been manually smoothing the surfaces using the soften tool in God mode, the results doesn't look that bad but I have over 200 larges cities in this region so I want to know if there is any easier way to get smoother surfaces without sacrificing topographic details. Thanks !!

here is a picture showing what I'm talking about

[harishna 847]

Well I haven't receive any replies or found a more "elegant" way to correct the erosion so I'm doing it by hand, and left the snow thing for now.

Now I got two new questions: I'm covering some mountains with trees, is there a way to do this the fast way?, currently I'm doing it using the god mode tool but, can this be done from Terraformer or another program?

and secondly how can I take a picture of the whole region?

[tungston 19]

The only thing I can help with is the region image, if you can find the "Region Census". The link I have for it is no longer in use.

[Heblem 600]

This might help you...

Download here:

http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/2/20/800718/Mexico_DF.SC4M

Map size: 16x16

Type of map: Real World 16-bit quality

Location: Mexico DF, Estado de M

[harishna 847]

Many thanks for that Heblem, I already tried it and worked perfectly, the rendering quality is exactly what I was looking for! 
I assume that what you mean is that the config needs to be 16x16, right? but doesn't that means it would be under scaled? If I got it right a big region in the game is equivalent to 16 square kilometers (4x4), right? and the area that this region covers is around 64x64 kilometers...so shouldn't the config also be 64x64? I hope you can help me clearing that out. Thanks again!

A ver si me animo de ponerme a practicar como hacer BATs para continuar con el trabajo que hicieron de modelos mexicanos.